
WILLI A 

PENN 




PIiPFPT SAPrrF.NT HOLLANI 




Copyright}! 



TTfrj 



COFi'RIGHT DEPOSm 



TRUE STORIES OF GREAT AMERICANS 



WILLIAM PENN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




aTimU/fl 



WILLIAM PENN 



BY 



^x 



RUPERT S. HOLLAND 

AUTHOR OF 

"HISTORIC BOYHOODS," "THE KNIGHTS OF 

THE GOLDEN SPUR," ETC. 



NelD gorft 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

All rights reserved 



■ Z 



Copyright, 1915, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1915. 



J. 8. Gushing Co. —Berwick &, Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 

SEP 16 1915 
©CI.A411533 



^ CONTENTS 

,^ CHAPTER I 

3 PAGfi 

William Penn goes to College . . . . i 

CHAPTER II 
The Early Quakers 9 

CHAPTER III 
William Penn Travels 18 

CHAPTER IV 
The Young Quaker Courtier .... 25 

CHAPTER V 
Penn helps his Friends 36 

CHAPTER VI 
Penn becomes a Man of Wealth .... 44 

CHAPTER VII 
Penn in Politics 55 

CHAPTER VIII 
First Visit to Pennsylvania 68 

V 



VI CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 

PAGB 

What Penn found in America .... 86 

CHAPTER X 
Troublous Days in England 94 

CHAPTER XI 
Penn in Disfavor 109 

CHAPTER XII 
Penn goes to America Again .... 225 

CHAPTER XIII 
At Court and in Prison . . . . . . 139 

CHAPTER XIV 
Penn's Work completed 151 

CHAPTER XV 
Pennsylvania under Penn's Descendants . .158 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Portrait of William Penn . . . Frontispiece . 

FACING PAGE 

Admiral Sir William Penn 28;/" 

Penn's Crest . ... . . .in text 43 

Penn's Seal in text 67 

The Letitia House in text 74 

The Treaty Tree 76 

Penn's Wampum Belt . ... in text 84 

Penn's Bible and Book-plate 100 

The Slate-roof House . ... in text 127 

Penn's Desk in text 130 

Tablet to the Memory of William Penn . ,156 
Four of William Penn's Grandchildren . .162 



vu 



WILLIAM PENN 

CHAPTER I 
William Penn goes to College 

The middle of the seventeenth century was a 
very exciting time in England. The Cavaliers 
of King Charles the First were fighting the Round- 
heads of Oliver Cromwell, and the whole country 
was divided into King's men and ParHament's 
men. On the side of Cromwell and the Parlia- 
ment was Admiral William Penn, who had in 
1646 been given command of a squadron of fight- 
ing ships with the title of Vice Admiral of Ireland, 
and who had proved to be an expert navigator 
and sea-fighter. He had married Margaret Jas- 
per, the daughter of an English merchant who 
lived in Rotterdam, and when he went to sea, he 
left his wife and children in the pretty little Eng- 
lish village of Wanstead, in the county of Essex. 

The Admiral's son William was born on October 
14, 1644, when four great battles of the English 



2 WILLIAM PENN 

Civil War had already been fought: Edge Hill, 
Newbury, Nantwich, and Marston Moor. The 
Roundheads were winning the victories, and these 
Puritan soldiers, fired with religious zeal, and tak- 
ing such striking names as ''Praise God Barebones'^ 
and "Sergeant Hew Agag in Pieces before the 
Lord," were battering down castles and cathedrals, 
smashing stained-glass windows and pipe organs, 
and showing their hatred of nobles and of church- 
men in every way they could think of. The wife 
of Admiral Penn, however, lived quietly in her 
country home, and by the time William was five 
years old the Cavaliers had lost the battle of 
Naseby, had surrendered Bridgewater and Bristol, 
and King Charles the First had been beheaded. 
A new England, a Puritan England, had taken the 
place of the old England, but the boy was too 
young to understand the difference. He knew that 
his father was now fighting the Dutch, but he was 
chiefly interested in the games he played with his 
schoolmates at Wanstead and with the boys from 
the neighboring village of Chigwell. 

Now Admiral Penn had fought on the side of 
the Roundheads because the English navy had 
sided with the Parliament, while the English army 
had largely sided with the king, and not from any 
real love of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. 



WILLIAM PENN GOES TO COLLEGE 3 

He was indeed a Royalist at heart, and had very 
little patience with the new religious ideas that 
were becoming so popular in England. The people 
in Wanstead, however, were mostly Puritans, and 
young William, boy though he was, heard so much 
about their religion that he became a little Puritan 
like his playmates. Some of the fathers and 
mothers boasted that they had seen "visions," 
and soon the children were repeating what their 
parents said. Strange experiences of that kind 
were in the air, and so little William Penn, when 
he was only eleven, claimed that he had himself 
met with such an adventure, and seen a "vision" 
too. 

The news of this story of William's would have 
annoyed his father, but the Admiral was too much 
concerned at the time with his own difficulties to 
give much heed to his son. Admiral Penn had 
sent word secretly to the exiled son of Charles I. 
that he would enter his service against Oliver 
Cromwell, and the latter heard of it, and when 
the Admiral returned to England, Cromwell had 
him clapped into the Tower of London to keep 
him out of mischief. Mrs. Penn and her children 
went up to London and lodged in a little court 
near the Tower, where they might at least be near 
the Admiral. Presently the Admiral, stripped of 



4 WILLIAM PENN 

his commission, was released, and left London for 
a country place in Ireland that Cromwell had given 
him for his earlier services. There he stayed until 
the Royalists got the better of the Roundheads, 
and Charles II. was placed on the English throne. 
Then Admiral Penn hurried to welcome the new 
king, was made a knight for his loyalty, and began 
to bask in the full sunshine of royal favor. He 
was now a great figure at court, was a man 
of wealth, and a close friend and adviser to the 
king's brother, James, Duke of York, Lord High 
Admiral of England. Being so thoroughly a 
Royalist and Church of England man himself, it 
never occurred to him that his son William was 
already more than half a Puritan. 

The Admiral sent his son to the aristocratic 
Christ Church College at Oxford when Wilham was 
sixteen, and entered him as a gentleman commoner, 
which gave him a higher social standing than most 
of the students. The father meant his son to be 
a courtier and man of fashion, and wanted him to 
make friends among the young aristocrats of 
Oxford. But Oxford University, like the rest of 
England, had felt the Puritan influence during the 
days when Cromwell was Lord Protector, and 
although the Cavaliers did everything they could 
to restore the revelries and sports of the good old 



WILLIAM PENN GOES TO COLLEGE 5 

times of Charles the First, some of the soberer 
notions of the Puritans still stuck to the place. 
The Puritans were fond of long sermons and much 
psalm-singing, and shook their heads at all games 
and Hght entertainments. The Royalists stopped 
as much psalm-singing as they could, while they 
themselves got up Morris dances and May-day 
games and all kinds of masques and revels. Some- 
times they went too far in their desire to oppose 
the Puritans, and indulged in all sorts of dissipa- 
tions. Young William Penn, and many other boys 
at college, thought the Royalists were too dis- 
solute, and leaned toward the Puritan standards; 
but he was the son of a knight and a courtier, as 
well as being naturally fond of sports and gayety, 
and so he did not dress so soberly nor attend so 
many sermons as some of his college friends. 
When the king's brother, Henry, Duke of Glouces- 
ter, died of smallpox, Oxford University issued a 
volume of verses, called '^Threnodia," on the 
duke's death, and young William Penn sent in some 
Latin Hnes for the volume. In some matters he 
was a strong king's man, but in others he was more 
fond of the stricter Puritan notions. Withal he 
was a fairly good student, a popular young fellow, 
and something of an athlete. He might very 
well have graduated and followed his father to the 



6 WILLIAM PENN 

king's court at London had not a new and strange 
religious party caught his wide-awake attention 
while he was at college. 

When WilHam Penn went to Oxford, some people 
in England were beginning to be called Quakers, 
or, as they preferred to be known, Friends. They 
were almost as much opposed to the Puritans as 
they were to the RoyaHsts, who belonged to the 
Church of England. They were a religious sect, 
and more. They refused to pay the tithes or 
taxes for the support of the Established Church, 
they refused to take an oath in the law courts, 
they would wear their hats in court and in the 
presence of important persons. They called every 
one by his first name, and would not use any 
title, even that of Mister; ''thee" and "thou" 
took the place of " you," although those pronouns 
had customarily only been used to servants. 
Nothing gave so much offense to a Royalist as to 
have a Quaker say "thee" or "thou" to him. 
They preached in taverns and in highways, and 
walked the streets uttering prophecies of doom in 
a loud singsong voice. Either because of this 
trembling mode of speech, or because their leader, 
George Fox, had bade the magistrates tremble at 
the word of the Lord, they were called Quakers. 

It seemed to both the Churchmen and the 



WILLIAM PENN GOES TO COLLEGE 7 

Puritans that these Quakers were breaking away 
from all forms of religion; they did not believe 
in baptism nor in the communion service; they 
would not listen to clergymen or hired preachers, 
and often they sat silent in their meetings, only 
speaking when one of them felt inspired to address 
them. Quietness was their watchword, and so 
they condemned all sports and games, theaters, 
dancing, card playing ; they disapproved of soldiers 
and of fighting ; they kept out of politics, and they 
dressed as soberly as possible. Their leader, 
George Fox, was a strange person, very brave but 
very excitable, and he managed to rouse discussion 
wherever he went. Again and again he was put 
in jail ; he was stoned and abused and laughed at ; 
but such was his power that more and more people 
came to follow him, and admired and reverenced 
and loved him. 

It may seem strange that the Quakers should 
have appealed so strongly to a youth Hke William 
Penn, who was a gentleman commoner at the 
most aristocratic college in England, a good-look- 
ing, popular, sport-loving fellow, surrounded by 
the sons of noblemen and courtiers. The answer 
must be that he was by nature serious-minded and 
very much interested in questions of rehgion. 
More than that, he had in him a strong streak of 



8 WILLIAM PENN 

heroism which made it easy for him to throw his 
whole soul into a cause that appealed to him. 
Whatever Perm was he was never lukewarm, but 
ardent and fiery and always tremendously in 
earnest. 

He left Oxford after about two years, and there 
is a story that he was expelled because he and some 
friends refused to obey a college rule about the 
wearing of gowns and tore off the surplices that were 
worn by the Church of England students. He had 
heard the Quaker preacher Thomas Loe, and al- 
though he had not actually joined the Society of 
Friends he was already largely of a mind to. From 
college he went to his father's house in London, 
and then Admiral Sir William Penn found that his 
son was not at all the worldly-minded youth he 
had hoped, but a young man of quite a different 
sort. He did not care for the life of a cavalier or 
court gallant, but wanted to go to strange religious 
meetings. The Admiral begged and entreated, 
threatened and stormed, used arguments and even 
blows, and finally in a fit of rage drove his son from 
his house. But Lady Penn pleaded for her son, 
and the Admiral at length allowed William to 
return to his home. 



CHAPTER II 

The Early Quakers 

To understand the history of William Penn we 
must have a clear idea of the Quaker faith in the 
time of Charles II. All through the Middle Ages 
the Christian Church, which was the Roman 
Catholic Church, had built up a network of beliefs 
that people took for granted, so that men never used 
their minds where religion was concerned, but were, 
to all intents and purposes, merely children, be- 
lieving whatever the priests told them to believe. 
For centuries England, as well as all of Western 
Europe, had taken its creed directly from the 
Pope and his clergy, no more doubting the truth 
of what was told them than a child doubts the 
truth of the multiplication-table. But at length 
certain men of unusual independence of mind, men 
such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, became 
restless under the arbitrary teachings of the Pope 
and dared to question whether the priests were 
always right, no matter what they said. These 
men, and others Hke them, took part in what was 

9 



10 WILLIAM PENN 

known as the Reformation, an era in which men 
began to do a little thinking for themselves. The 
revival of the classical learning of Greece and 
Rome and the invention of the printing-press 
helped this new freedom of thought greatly. The 
first books to come from the printing-presses were 
copies of the Bible, which had formerly been beyond 
the reach of all but the priests, and as men soon 
translated the Scriptures from Latin into English 
and French and German and other languages, the 
people gradually became able to read the Old and 
New Testaments for themselves. The Bible was 
no longer a sealed book, from which the clergy gave 
the ordinary man and woman as much or as little 
as they thought good. It was free to all, and new 
teachers began to explain its meaning according to 
their own ideas. 

It took a long time, however, for men to break 
away from the implicit obedience they had given 
for centuries to the Church of Rome. The most 
daring reformers only rid themselves of one or 
two dogmas at a time. WycHffe, the first great 
leader of the Reformation in England, only denied 
a part of the truth of the Mass, and kept almost all 
the rest of the Catholic behef . Huss, who followed 
him, only dared to doubt the truth of certain of 
the miracles, though he did declare that he believed 



THE EARLY QUAKERS 1 1 

in religious liberty. Martin Luther himself de- 
voted most of his eloquence to attacking the sale 
of indulgences, which had been carried to great 
excess. Later he grew so bold as to oppose the 
authority of the Pope, but he still held to the larger 
part of the creed of the early Church. 

In England Henry the Eighth had broken with 
the Pope chiefly because the latter had refused to 
grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and 
not because of any great difference in religious 
views. This break, however, gave the reformers 
an ofiicial position in England, and led to the 
establishment of the Church of England, which 
was called a Protestant Church to distinguish it 
from the Catholic. Henry's daughter, Mary, was 
a Catholic, and her reign saw a bitter struggle in 
England between Catholics and the new reform 
Protestants. Mary's sister, Elizabeth, favored the 
Protestants, and with her reign the new Church 
actually came into its own, and the teachings of the 
Reformation began to bear fruit. 

Very gradually, then, men came to think more 
and more freely for themselves. The Church of 
England discarded some of the beliefs of the 
Roman Catholic Church, but held to a great many 
of them, and once it became well fixed as the 
Established Church of England it also became 



12 WILLIAM PENN 

conservative, and insisted that people should obey 
its teachings, just as the Catholic Church had 
done. But the idea of the right of every one to 
think for himself had been set roUing and could not 
be stopped. Men and women who wished liberty 
to worship God in their own way went to America 
and founded communities with that principle as 
their basis, while others in England began to show 
their independence of the Established Church, and 
began to league themselves together as Presbyte- 
rians or Lutherans, under a number of different 
names, and many were often spoken of as Puritans. 
The Civil War between Charles I. and Parliament 
was also largely a war between the men of the 
Church of England and the Puritans. Then, when 
the Puritans had won a place for themselves and a 
certain amount of power, they in their turn be- 
came conservative, and wanted to impose their 
own beliefs and religious observances upon the 
rest of England. 

By this time, however, men had grown so used 
to freedom of thought in religious matters that 
every little group had its own peculiar creed. Any 
man of an original turn of mind could start a new 
sect and win converts. The Puritans themselves 
were not sufficiently liberal to suit men who now 
took pride in recognizing no authority in questions 



THE EARLY QUAKERS 13 

as to what they should think. Most of these 
small sects played very small parts in history. 
Some, such as the Independents, the Anabaptists, 
and the Pietists, flourished for a short time, and 
then became merged in other sects. The Quakers, 
however, made a much stronger appeal than many 
of the others, and drew into their ranks a great 
number of those who were dissatisfied with the 
conservatism of the Catholics, the Church of 
England, and the Puritans. 

The reason the Quakers absorbed many of the 
other sects and grew so rapidly, and doubtless the 
chief reason why they appealed so strongly to the 
liberal mind of young William Penn, was that they 
set forth as their aim the definite plan of returning 
to primitive Christianity in its simplest form. To 
those men and women who thought that all religion 
had become hopelessly corrupt through the igno- 
rance and fraud and cruelty of the priesthood that 
had so long controlled the church, the Quaker leaders 
tried to show that original Christianity was as pure 
and simple as ever. What they wanted was that 
people should return to the doctrines of the Chris- 
tian Church as they were before the Bishop of 
Rome became Pope, and before the priests inter- 
preted the Bible as best suited themselves. The 
Quaker teachers declared that the Church of 



14 WILLIAM PENN 

England and the Puritans had gone only half- 
way; they were still making their appeal chiefly 
to the rich and influential ; this new religion was to 
satisfy the ordinary, the poor, the simple, those 
who cared Uttle for wealth or high station. No 
wonder that this direct appeal made many converts 
among the great mass of English people, who were 
tired of the endless struggles between kings and 
parliaments, bishops and ministers. 

In their desire to return to the simplicity of the 
early days of the Christian Church, the Quakers 
became earnest students of those who were called 
the fathers of the Church, — the early writers on 
Christianity, such as Tertullian, Justin Martyr, 
Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Origen. There they found 
the principles of a religious worship that was free 
from all elaborate ceremonies. There they found 
an absolute freedom of opinion ; preachers who 
served without pay and solely because they felt 
spiritually called upon to preach ; they also found 
that many of the early Christians were opposed 
to war and to the taking of oaths, and that they 
protested against the use of titles, elaborate 
clothes, and entertainments that tended to cor- 
rupt the tastes. Therefore it was easy for the 
Quaker leaders to show their audiences that the 
ideas they were urging upon them were actually 



THE EARLY QUAKERS 15 

the beliefs of the earliest Christians, and were 
therefore worthy of earnest consideration. 

Other people had urged a return to primitive 
Christianity earlier than the Quakers. The Albi- 
genses, in the south of France during the thirteenth 
century, and the Waldenses, who lived in the valleys 
of Piedmont, in Northern Italy, both held somewhat 
similar ideas, but in each case the iron hand of 
persecution had suppressed them. The Quakers 
would doubtless have met with a similar fate had 
they come into existence a century earlier, for they 
held even more extreme views than had the Albi- 
genses. But by the reign of Charles II. the 
principles of the Reformation had made such head- 
way that it was impossible to do away with a new 
form of religion by killing its converts. The 
government was wiUing to go a certain distance in 
suppressing these new heretics, and ordinances 
were passed empowering justices to imprison any 
who denied the validity of the sacraments of bap- 
tism and the Lord's Supper. Quakers who held 
meetings in the streets or market-places were 
liable to be arrested for committing a breach of 
the peace, and their missionaries were often treated 
as vagrants and whipped; but these were ex- 
tremely light punishments compared with those 
that had been inflicted earlier, 



l6 WILLIAM PENN 

Although there were a few men and women 
among the early Quakers who made themselves 
conspicuous by their extreme views, as there are 
among the people of any sect, the Quakers were 
for the greater part a remarkably sober, sensible, 
and law-abiding party. The Catholics, the Puri- 
tans, the Presbyterians, and others had never 
hesitated to hold their meetings in secret when the 
laws seemed too severe against them. The Quakers, 
however, never held secret meetings; they per- 
formed their duties openly, no matter how much the 
magistrates were opposed to them. They argued 
their cause freely and openly on all occasions, and 
they wrote a great many pamphlets setting forth 
their belief and also telHng to what persecutions 
they had been subjected. These tracts were 
widely distributed, and served to call attention to 
the reasonableness of their cause and to win 
sympathy for their struggles with the law. 

They also soon showed the English virtue of 
obstinacy in their cause ; for no matter how many 
times they were imprisoned or arrested they con- 
tinued steadfastly on their course. At first people 
laughed at the Quakers' custom of holding their 
religious meetings in prison just as they might have 
held them in their meetinghouses, but before long 
the laughter changed to respect, and finally be- 



THE EARLY QUAKERS IJ 

came sincere admiration. The Puritans, who had 
themselves had to endure the same sort of treat- 
ment a little while before, could appreciate the 
attitude of this still younger rehgious movement, 
and though they did not sympathize with the 
views of the Quakers they came to admire their 
courageous independence. 

William Penn, young as he was, saw that the 
Quakers stood at the opposite pole from what he 
had come to consider a superstitious priesthood; 
he saw that with them religion had nothing to do 
with pohtics or power; that it was destined to 
stand for a more reasonable and simple faith than 
any of the others then existing in England. It 
was the latest form of that great wave of liberty 
that had begun with the Reformation ; and as the 
latest it appealed to him as the most liberal form. 
He had a natural interest in religion, a natural 
earnestness of mind that led him to study the new 
movement, and sufficient strength of judgment to 
be able to find the truth in it that was hidden 
from many others. Add to this a basis of heroism, 
inherited from adventure-loving ancestors, and it 
is not difficult to see how the young man was led 
to sympathize with, and then to adopt, the Quaker 
faith as his own. 



CHAPTER III 
William Penn Travels 

When his son William came home from Oxford, 
Admiral Penn was a prominent figure in London. 
He held numerous offices, for he was a Naval 
Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, Governor 
of Kinsale, Admiral of Ireland, a Member of the 
Council of Munster, and a favorite of King Charles 
and the Duke of York. He was in high hopes that 
he would soon be made a peer. His wife, Lady 
Penn, and his daughter Margaret, or Peg, as she 
was usually called, were fond of society and fashion. 
It was somewhat natural, therefore, that Admiral 
Penn should not altogether understand or appre- 
ciate the new religious views of his son William. 
He thought the youth exceedingly willful, but could 
not beheve that his interest in the new movement 
was anything more than a passing whim. There- 
fore, in order to interest Wihiam in other things, he 
introduced him to his own friends and showed him 
something of the pleasant side of fife at King 
Charles's court. He took William to suppers at 

i8 



WILLIAM PENN TRAVELS 19 

the Bear Inn, and to plays at Dmry Lane Theater. 
There was a satire on the Puritans, called " The 
Jovial Crew," then being given at a theater known 
as '^The Cockpit," and the Admiral took WiUiam 
there in order to show him how absurd Puritans, 
and all the newer rehgious sects, actually were. 
But no matter how heartily the Admiral laughed 
and encouraged his son to laugh, he could not get 
William to throw himself into the pleasures of 
London Hf e as readily as he thought a normal young 
fellow ought to. 

The father was really very fond of his son, and 
spent considerable time in casting about as to what 
was best for his boy. At length it occurred to him 
that a visit to the gay city of Paris would entertain 
William, and drive out of his head some of his 
strange Oxford notions. Some of his college 
friends were going to France to study, and the 
Admiral arranged that William should go abroad 
with them. Some of them were of high rank, 
and they would easily have entrance to the best 
French society. 

The young men were made welcome in Paris. 
Penn was presented to the king, Louis XIV, 
and was charmed by the brilliance of the French 
court. He made the acquaintance of enter- 
taining people, and he had at least one adven- 



20 WILLIAM PENN 

ture. The story is told that as he was return- 
ing late one night from a ball, he was stopped 
by a rogue who angrily called out to him to draw 
his sword and defend himself. The rascal flashed 
his own rapier before Penn's eyes, and declared 
that Penn had insulted him, — that he had bowed 
and taken off his hat politely to the young EngHsh- 
man, but that the latter had paid no attention to 
him. Penn answered courteously that he had not 
seen the stranger, and so could not have insulted 
him by failing to bow to him. The stranger, 
however, only grew more excited, and insisted that 
Penn must fight him or he would run him through. 
Penn saw that argument was useless, and being 
by that time angry himself, drew his own sword 
and stood on defense. The street was dark, but 
a small crowd had gathered, attracted by the loud 
words, and several men announced that they would 
see fair play. The swords flashed in a few passes, 
and then Penn showed himself the more skillful 
swordsman. With a twist of his rapier he sent his 
opponent's sword flying into the air. The crowd 
expected him to attack his opponent again, but 
instead Penn stooped, and, picking up the other 
man's sword, handed it back to him with a bow, 
saying that he hoped the Frenchman was satisfied. 
News of the little encounter quickly spread among 



WILLIAM PENN TRAVELS 21 

the young Englishman's friends, and on the strength 
of it he became quite a hero. 

Meantime the Admiral in London was much 
pleased with the reports he had of William's suc- 
cess in the social world of Paris. He wanted him 
to have a more thorough education, however, than 
Oxford afforded, and so made arrangements that he 
should go to Professor Moses Amyrault, at Saumur, 
to live in his home and study under him. Penn 
followed his father's wishes and spent some time 
at Saumur, becoming well acquainted with the 
language and literature of France, and having a 
pleasant time generally. Afterwards with a friend 
he traveled through Switzerland into Italy, mak- 
ing a part of the "grand tour" that in those days 
was considered an important part of the education 
of every young Englishman of fashion. 

When he returned to London, he was very French 
and very gallant ; indeed, he was so much a gentle- 
man of fashion that Admiral Penn was really de- 
lighted. He had hopes, now, that William would, 
after all, follow in his own footsteps, and become a 
figure at the king's court. With that end in view 
Sir William entered his son at Lincoln's Inn to 
study law. If he was to hold important offices in 
the government of his country, he must have some 
knowledge of law ; and, besides, the legal training 



22 WILLIAM PENN 

would bring him into contact with rising men of 
good families. So William began his studies, and 
the Admiral, well pleased, embarked with the 
Duke of York to fight the Dutch. 

Penn's studies at Lincoln's Inn were interrupted 
by the great plague that swept over London and 
devastated the city. Like most other people of 
means he left the place and went into the country, 
carrying with him memories of the sick and suffer- 
ing in the wretched, ill-kept streets and alleys. He 
was lonely in the country, and he could not help 
remembering the scenes in the plague-stricken 
town; so that when his father came back and 
joined him, the Admiral found William again in 
his former speculative frame of mind. To once 
more divert his mind. Sir WilHam sent him to enter 
the service of the Duke of Ormond, who, as Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland, held quite a court in the 
city of Dublin. 

The Admiral was Governor of ELinsale, in County 
Cork, and William was given charge of his father^s 
affairs there, as well as being employed in various 
ways by the Duke of Ormond. He enjoyed this 
work, and when there was a mutiny of the soldiers 
at Carrickfergus, he took a large part in quelling it, 
so pleasing the duke by his abihty that the latter 
suggested that young Penn should be made cap- 



WILLIAM PENN TRAVELS 23 

tain of the AdmiraFs troop of soldiers. Sir Wil- 
liam was glad to hear such good reports of his son, 
but did not think him fitted as yet to command his 
soldiers. 

Young Penn was enjoying life on his father's 
estate and at the duke's court in Dublin, and was 
decidedly the courtier and man of affairs; when 
one day, being in Cork on business, he happened to 
hear the preaching of Thomas Loe, a man he had 
already heard at Oxford. The message of that 
sermon lay in the words, ''There is a faith which 
overcomes the world, and there is a faith which is 
overcome by the world." It made a deep impres- 
sion on the young man. Was his faith of the type 
that overcomes the world ? Or was it of the kind 
that is overcome by pride of place and fortune? 
He feared that thus far his faith had shown itself 
of the latter sort. He gave a great deal of thought 
to that message of Thomas Loe. 

Being so ardent by nature, he determined that 
his faith should overcome the temptations that 
surrounded him. He would fight by the side of 
those who believed in the simple teachings of early 
Christianity and who were unhampered by the 
forms and ceremonies the other churches had im- 
posed upon their members. Thomas Loe's sermon 
was the spark that set Penn's zeal ablaze. He 



24 WILLIAM PENN 

made up his mind to become a Quaker, in spite of 
all that his family or friends might say. The new 
faith had made its appeal to the deepest springs of 
his earnest and religious nature. 

So William Penn, already considerable of a 
courtier, became a Quaker ; and contrived, strange 
though it seems, to be both things at one and the 
same time. His father had been both a Round- 
head and a Royalist, though in his case it had always 
been from motives of self-interest. The son was 
now to combine two widely different types of man, 
but with him this resulted entirely from the two 
sides of his nature. Yet it was a very odd com- 
bination, that of a Quaker and a courtier, and one 
sure to bring him into many curious situations. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Young Quaker Courtier 

William Penn had studied at Oxford, had 
traveled and mixed with gay people on the Con- 
tinent, had been entered as a law student at Lin- 
coln's Inn, had been employed by the Duke of 
Ormond in Ireland, and now had decided to throw 
in his lot with the people of this new religion that 
had suddenly sprung up in England and who called 
themselves by the simple name of Friends. He 
stayed in Ireland, looking after his father's business 
at Kinsale, still wearing the bright clothes of a 
cavaHer, but he went regularly to all the meetings 
of Quakers that were held in Cork. These meet- 
ings were no more popular with the government in 
Ireland than in England, and while Penn was 
attending one on September 3, 1667, several 
constables, with a squad of soldiers, appeared at 
the doors and arrested everybody on the charge 
of holding a riotous assembly. There is a story, 
perhaps not altogether true, that, as the first 
soldier entered the hall to break up the meeting, 

25 



26 WILLIAM PENN 

William Penn seized him by the collar, and would 
have thrown him down the stairs had not some 
older members interfered and told the young man 
that such an act would be inconsistent with the 
Quaker's love of peace. 

Penn, however, was probably not as hot-headed 
as the story would indicate; he went with the 
other Quakers to the mayor, and that official, 
seeing that the young man wore cavalier dress, 
offered to set him free if he would give bond for 
his future good behavior. Penn would not agree 
to this; instead he argued that the arrest of the 
Quakers was altogether unlawful. Thereupon he 
was sent to prison, and from there he wrote a re- 
markably well-worded letter to the Earl of Orrery, 
the Lord President of Munster, setting forth the 
injustice of interfering in such a way with any 
people's religion. 

The young man of three-and-twenty had stood 
by his new comrades, and had written an excellent 
letter on their behalf, but there was no gainsaying 
the fact that he himself was in a rather bad pHght. 
The dashing young cavalier, son of the courtier 
Sir Wilham Penn, and a member of the Duke of 
Ormond's court at Dublin, had actually been 
caught in all his fine clothes at a meeting of the 
Quakers, and had been marched off to prison with 



THE YOUNG QUAKER COURTIER 27 

a troop of his new friends. That was an enter- 
taining bit of gossip ; but as soon as it came to the 
ears of the Earl of Orrery, that nobleman, being a 
friend of Admiral Penn, and anxious to rescue his 
son from the company of the Quakers, ordered that 
William should be released from prison. Time 
and again it happened that William Penn, being a 
cavalier as well as a Quaker, was gently handled 
by cavalier officers on account of his rank and 
position. 

The Admiral had heard of this new "prank," as 
he chose to call it, of his son, and had ordered 
William home. William obeyed willingly enough. 
In his famous Diary we find Mr. Pepys, who was 
no great admirer of Admiral Penn, writing at this 
time: ''At night comes Mrs. Turner to see us; 
and then among other talk she tells me that Mr. 
William Penn, who is lately come over from Ire- 
land, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy 
thing; that he cares for no company, nor comes 
into any ; which is a pleasant thing after his being 
abroad so long and his father such a hypocritical 
rogue." 

But other surprises were awaiting Admiral Penn. 
He soon found that William kept his hat on when 
talking to him, which, in the Admiral's opinion, 
was a mark of great disrespect. He sternly asked 



28 WILLIAM PENN 

William what he meant by this. William boldly 
answered that it was a Quaker custom and that he 
was a Quaker. The father argued, pleaded, and 
stormed, and finally asked if William would not at 
least take off his hat in the presence of three per- 
sons, — his father, the king, and the Duke of 
York. This was a great concession on the part of 
the Admiral, and shows that he must at last have 
waked up to the fact of his son's determination. 
But all William would answer was that he would 
"consider the matter." 

This answer made Sir William furious. He 
thought his son meant to ask the advice of some 
of his new friends. The son, however, asked no 
advice, but after long thought announced that he 
could not grant his father's request. 

Then the Admiral, in a great huff, turned Wil- 
liam out of the house, and the latter went to visit 
various friends, his mother secretly sending him 
money from time to time. Finally Lady Penn 
won her husband's consent to allowing William to 
return home ; but his father treated William like 
a stranger and gave up trying to help a son, who, 
in his opinion, was such an ungrateful and stiff- 
necked fellow. 

The people of the court and town in the Eng- 
land of Charles II. were a very dissipated and 




Reproduced from Buell's " William Penn, through the courtesy of D. Appleton ana 

Company. 

Admiral Sir William Penn, Father of William Penn. 



From the portrait by Peter Van Dyke. 



V 



THE YOUNG QUAKER COURTIER 29 

unprincipled set. Most of the fashionable people 
were proud of their lack of morals, and the plays, 
the writings, and even the speech of the ruling 
class were coarse and vulgar beyond belief. Wil- 
liam Penn saw all this, and his nature, being on a 
higher plane and more serious than that of his 
father's friends, turned instinctively to those who 
were Hving clean and respectable lives. In the 
jumble of new ideas and new religions he found 
comfort in the simplest and quietest sect ; and now, 
having publicly declared himself a Quaker, he 
asked permission to be one of their preachers. 

The Quakers were glad to have a man of Wil- 
liam Penn's education and position join their 
ranks, and when he was twenty-four, he was ac- 
cepted as one of their regular preachers. Several 
other men of his own type joined the new sect at 
about the same time, and these men, having 
better judgment than the earliest leaders, began to 
do away with the rather extreme preachings of 
Fox, and taught a simple and easily understood 
Christianity. Penn himself kept his cavalier dress, 
and even continued for a time to wear his sword, 
which was a sign of a person of fashion. He asked 
the advice of George Fox about keeping his sword, 
and the latter, in spite of his extreme views, said, 
^*I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst." 



30 WILLIAM PENN 

The new recruit made himself very useful to the 
religious party he had joined. Besides preaching, 
he wrote a number of tracts, the first of which he 
called ''Truth Exalted." In this he attacked, 
according to the custom of the times, all religious 
views that differed from his own, and answered 
the criticisms of other sects. He was even more 
useful in interceding for Quakers who had been 
put in prison. Having friends at court, and being 
still regarded as something of a courtier, he could 
appeal to the officers of state better than others of 
the new sect. His arguments in favor of setting 
the Quaker prisoners at liberty were listened to 
respectfully by the high officials, but his requests 
at that time were not granted. 

The young preacher and tract writer soon had 
his hands full with heated arguments and stormy 
disputes. He wrote a pamphlet called ''The 
Guide Mistaken," and at about the same time two 
men who belonged to the congregation of the 
Presbyterian preacher Thomas Vincent in London 
became Quakers. Thomas Vincent was very angry 
and called Penn unpleasant names. Thereupon 
Penn and his friend George Whitehead challenged 
Vincent to an open debate in the latter's church. 
The challenge was accepted. 

Penn and Whitehead went to Vincent's church, 



THE YOUNG QUAKER COURTIER 31 

which was crowded, and as they pushed their way- 
forward Vincent denounced them in no measured 
words. The two Quakers joined in the wordy 
warfare, and began a heated religious argument, 
while the congregation hissed and flung at them 
such names as ''blasphemers" and ''villains." 
Vincent himself kept interrupting, and at length, 
pretending to be shocked at what the two men were 
saying, began to pray for them. The people blew 
out the candles that lighted the church and tried 
to eject the two Quakers. The meeting ended in 
uproar, as was usually the case in the religious 
debates of those days. 

Not in the least daunted by the harsh and un- 
kind criticisms that were showered on him from all 
sides, Penn wrote more pamphlets, criticizing the 
religious views of some of the older sects, and call- 
ing many of their ideas relics of the ignorance and 
superstition of the Middle Ages. He was a clear 
and powerful writer and showed his satisfaction in 
stating in black and white the views that had led 
him to believe that truth was to be found in the 
religion of the Quakers rather than in any other 
creed. This was doubtless more satisfactory to 
him than holding noisy and hot-tempered argu- 
ments with opponents on street corners or in public 
halls, and won for him the reputation of being the 



32 WILLIAM PENN 

ablest of all the early Quaker leaders. Samuel 
Pepys, of the famous Diary, says thus frankly of 
Penn's pamphlet, ''The Sandy Foundation 
Shaken," "I find it so well writ as I think it is too 
good for him ever to have writ it ; and it is a serious 
sort of book and not fit for everybody to read." 
Pepys is nothing if not outspoken, and his view 
was doubtless the same as that held by many fash- 
ionable people who knew the twenty-four-year-old 
author and considered him a strange, misguided 
young man. 

Although Penn might have been allowed to 
preach as he pleased in the fields or market-places, 
it became quite another matter when he printed 
his views and scattered them broadcast throughout 
England. The Bishop of London read one of 
Wilham Penn's pamphlets and decided that the 
writer was denying the fact of the divinity of Christ. 
That had been made a crime by act of the EngKsh 
Parliament. The young man was arrested and 
imprisoned in the Tower of London, and though 
his cavalier friends tried to get him out they met 
with no success, and for some time they were not 
allowed even to see him. Some one told him that 
the Bishop of London had determined that he must 
either publicly recant his impious views or spend 
the rest of his Hfe in the prison of the Tower. 



THE YOUNG QUAKER COURTIER 33 

Penn calmly and boldly wrote: ''All is well: I 
wish they had told me so before, since the expecting 
of a release put a stop to some business; thou 
mayst tell my father, who I know will ask thee, 
these words : that my prison shall be my grave, 
before I will budge a jot ; for I owe my conscience 
to no mortal man ; I have no need to fear ; God 
will make amends for all ; they are mistaken in me ; 
I value not their threats and resolutions, for they 
shall know I can weary out their malice and 
peevishness, and in me shall they all behold a resolu- 
tion above fear; conscience above cruelty, and a 
baffle put to all their designs by the spirit of pa- 
tience. . . . Neither great nor good things are 
ever attained without loss and hardships. He 
that would reap and not labor, must faint with the 
wind and perish in disappointments; but an hair 
of my head shall not fall without the Providence of 
my Father that is over all." Brave words these to 
be written by a youth in a cell of the Tower of Lon- 
don with small prospect of leaving it ! 

In his gloomy prison Wihiam Penn, like Cer- 
vantes and Walter Raleigh and John Bunyan, 
took to writing a book, one that he called ''No 
Cross, No Crown." It became the most famous 
of all his writings. To people who read it now, 
when every one may think as he pleases on reli- 



34 WILLIAM PENN 

gious matters, the ideas in this book are not particu- 
larly new or striking; but Penn's statement that 
the cross was not meant to be considered as an 
outward thing of wood and nails, but as an inward 
inspiration, and that reHgion was the feeling of each 
individual regarding divine subjects rather than 
a matter of words and customs, ~ all this was 
startling and even revolutionary in that far-away 
time. 

Fresh abuse was heaped upon him for his new 
writings, and he was called all the bitter names 
that the enemies of the Quakers could invent. 
Meantime he sent a letter to Lord Arlington, the 
Secretary of State, in which he asked to be freed 
from prison because he had had no trial and had not 
been allowed to make any defense. ^^ Force," 
he wisely said, ^^may make hypocrites, but it can 
never make converts." He ended his letter boldly. 
'*I make no apology for my letter, as a trouble — 
the usual style of supplicants ; because I think the 
honor that will accrue to thee by being just and 
releasing the opprest exceeds the advantage that 
can succeed to me." 

The Bishop and the government did not intend 
to give William Penn a chance to make a dramatic 
speech in defense of the Quakers at a trial, but in- 
stead they sent his father and other friends to argue 



THE YOUNG QUAKER COURTIER 35 

with him. Their arguments had little effect, and 
the prisoner resigned himself to doing without a 
trial. He did not, however, want the world to 
think that he had meant to deny the divinity of 
Christ, and so he now wrote another pamphlet to 
explain his belief. 

This pamphlet gave his friends a better chance to 
work for his release. Admiral Penn was a great 
friend of the king's brother, and the latter finally 
went to the king and persuaded him to order that 
William be set at liberty. So after nine months of 
imprisonment in the Tower the young Quaker 
Cavalier was free again, thanks not so much to the 
justice of his appeal for liberty as to his powerful 
friends at court. 

He then began to look about to see how he could 
be of most service to the people who were of his own 
religious faith. 



CHAPTER V 

Penn helps his Friends 

By this time no one could doubt that William 
Penn had courage, for it took considerable bravery 
to face and endure imprisonment in the Tower of 
London as he had done, and this show of courage 
won admiration even from his father the Admiral. 
At this time Sir William was having troubles of 
his own. The command of his fleet had been taken 
from him, and he was suffering from the gout; 
altogether he was not in a very pleasant frame of 
mind, but he softened sufficiently toward his son 
to ask him to go again to Ireland to look after the 
family property there, although the request was 
made through William's devoted mother, and not 
directly. When he wrote to his son, he showed 
that he still rather doubted William's filial regard, 
for he said, *'If you are ordained to be another cross 
to me, God's will be done, and I shall arm myself 
as best I can against it." 

When William reached Ireland, he found the lot 
of the Quakers was then no better than it had 

36 



PENN HELPS HIS FRIENDS 37 

been before. Their very virtues — for they were 
generally a hard-working and thrifty people — 
had set many against them. Indeed, nearly all the 
Quakers in Cork had been lodged in prison. Even 
in prison, however, they managed to carry on their 
affairs ; for, said Penn, they turned the jail into 
'^a meetinghouse and a workhouse, for they would 
not be idle anywhere." 

He at once set to work to help these friends of 
his, and drew up a statement of the charges against 
the imprisoned Quakers and a defense of them, and 
with the help of some friends took the matter to 
the Lord Lieutenant at Dublin, with the result 
that before long the Quakers in Cork were given 
their freedom. Encouraged by this success, he 
made it his business to try to free people of his 
religion whenever he found them in the grasp of 
the law. 

He managed the family estate in Ireland so well 
that when he went back to London in 1670, his father 
decided to forgive his son all the trouble he had 
put him to, and the courtier father and the Quaker 
son were completely reconciled. That did not 
mean, however, that the son had given up any of 
his opinions. It happened that at about the same 
time the government decided that the new religion 
was winning too many converts, and so put into 



38 WILLIAM PENN 

effect a law that made unlawful any meetings for 
religious worship other than those held by the 
Church of England, by the terms of which law the 
magistrates were allowed to fine and imprison 
offenders without giving them a trial by jury; 
it also allowed to those who gave information about 
such illegal meetings one third of all the fines that 
were imposed. Whenever the Quakers held a 
meeting, therefore, some enemy was sure to give 
notice of it, and many Friends were imprisoned 
and more were fined, of course to the advantage 
of meddling busybodies. 

One day in August William went to a Quaker 
meetinghouse in Gracechurch Street in London, 
and happened to find soldiers on guard before the 
building. That roused the young man's spirit, 
and he with some of his companions decided to hold 
a '' silent meeting" on the sidewalk before the 
front doors. Presently Penn felt called upon to 
speak, but no sooner did he open his mouth than 
the soldiers pounced upon him and marched him 
off to the mayor. 

According to Quaker custom, Penn kept his hat 
on before the mayor, and this so maddened that 
official, that he said the prisoner ^'should have his 
hat pulled off, for all he was Admiral Penn's son." 
Then he went on to abuse the Admiral himself, 



PENN HELPS HIS FRIENDS 39 

saying that he had starved the sailors of his fleet, 
and repeating other stories that were popular 
among the Admiral's enemies. He threatened to 
send young William to Bridewell Prison, and see 
that he was soundly whipped ! Finally Penn was 
taken to a certain jail known as the Black Dog, 
where he was locked up with a number of other 
Quakers and Baptists and Independents, who had 
all been holding meetings in despite of the law. 
From the Black Dog William wrote to his father. 
*^I am very well," said he, ''and have no trouble 
upon my spirits, besides my absence from thee, 
especially at this juncture, but otherwise I can say, 
I was never better ; and what they have to charge 
me with is harmless." 

Penn and a man named William Mead were put 
on trial in the Old Bailey early in September, 1670, 
charged with having preached at an unlawful 
meeting, thereby causing a great concourse and 
tumult, to the disturbance of the king's peace and 
the great terror of many of his subjects. The two 
prisoners went into court with their hats on, but 
the officers promptly pulled the hats off. There- 
upon the judges ordered the officers to put the hats 
again on the prisoners' heads, and began to ques- 
tion them about their wearing hats in court. This 
was regarded as very disrespectful, and could not 



40 WILLIAM PENN 

pass unreproved. Finally the judges fined each 
man forty marks for such ''contempt of court." 

The prisoners were not allowed lawyers to de- 
fend them, and the judges proceeded to make sport 
of the two Quakers, as if the trial were a form of 
bull-baiting. Penn said that he had broken no law, 
but had only been worshiping God according to 
his own conscience. He stood up for his rights as 
an Englishman, and evidently impressed the jury 
with the justice of his claims, for, in spite of all the 
efforts of the judges, the jury would only find him 
''guilty of speaking" in Gracechurch Street, and of 
no crime whatever. The judges sent the jury out 
again and again, finally keeping them locked up 
for two days and nights without beds or food, but 
the jury were not to be browbeaten. The judges 
at last had to accept the verdict, "not guilty," 
but in revenge fined each of the prisoners forty 
marks and ordered them imprisoned until the 
fines were paid, and in addition actually fined the 
jury for bringing in what they considered a mock 
verdict! • - 

Penn and Mead and the jury were then sent to 
Newgate, where they simply refused to buy their 
liberty by paying the unjust fines. From there 
Penn wrote to his father: "I in treat thee not to 
purchase my liberty. They will repent them of 



PENN HELPS HIS FRIENDS 41 

their proceedings. I am now a prisoner notoriously 
against law." In another letter he wrote: "Con- 
sidering I cannot be free, but upon such terms as 
strengthening their arbitrary and base proceed- 
ings, I shall rather choose to suffer any hardship. 
. . . My present restraint is so far from being 
humor, that I would rather perish than release 
myself by so indirect a course as to satiate their 
revengeful, avaricious appetites." 

The question of the right of the judges to fine 
the jury was finally brought before the Court of 
Common Pleas, which decided that the fines were 
unlawful, and ordered the jury set at liberty. 
Penn and Mead, however, had been fined for 
wearing their hats in court, and there is no knowing 
how long they might have been kept in prison if 
the Admiral, who was ill, had not disregarded his 
son's letters, and paid the fines of both Penn and 
Mead, when they were at once set at liberty. 

Admiral Penn was very ill, and when his son re- 
turned this time from prison, he was so much con- 
cerned for the future of a young man who seemed 
to have such a knack for getting into trouble that 
he sent a friend to the Duke of York asking that 
the duke look after William and try to defend him 
before King Charles should William continue in 
his course of resistance to the laws. Both the 



42 WILLIAM PENN 

duke and the king sent back their promises of help 
to the sick Admiral, and both of them kept those 
promises when WilHam Penn needed friends later on. 

As his gout increased the Admiral began to think 
that perhaps his son WilHam had been right after 
all, and that the court of King Charles II. was not 
altogether what it should be. He began to talk 
almost Hke a Puritan, and to condemn many of the 
nobles, once his boon companions, for their loose 
way of living. Father and son were drawn close 
together in those last days of the Admiral's ill- 
ness. Sir William said to his son, ''Three things I 
commend to you : 

" First. — Let nothing in this world tempt you 
to wrong your conscience ; so you will keep peace 
at home, which will be a feast to you in the day 
of trouble. 

''Secondly. — Whatever you design to do, lay 
it justly and time it seasonably, for that gives 
security and despatch. 

" Lastly. — Be not troubled at disappointments, 
for if they may be recovered, do it ; if they cannot, 
trouble is vain. If you could not have helped it, 
be content ; there is often peace and profit in sub- 
mitting to Providence : for afSictions make wise. 
If you could have helped it, let not your trouble 
exceed instruction for another time. 



PENN HELPS HIS FRIENDS 



43 



" These rules will carry you with firmness and 
comfort through this inconstant world.'' 

The Admiral died on September i6, 1670, 
leaving WilHam to look after his mother and his 
younger brother Richard. His sister Margaret 
had married Antony Lowther, of Maske, in York- 
shire. 




Penn's Crest. 



CHAPTER VI 

Penn becomes a Man of Wealth 

Admiral Penn had managed to accumulate a 
very considerable fortune, and as a result William, 
the eldest son, became a rich man. His family 
was a prominent one, he had many influential 
friends, and now had plenty of money ; so it was 
thought that he would naturally become a cavalier 
and gentleman of fashion. He soon made it clear, 
however, that he meant to retain the simple way of 
living adopted by the Quakers. Friends of his own 
age made fun of him, saying it was preposterous 
that a man of his means and abilities should spend 
his time with such dull people as those of the new 
religion. Sir John Robinson, the Lieutenant of 
the Tower of London, said to him, '^I vow, Mr. 
Penn, I am sorry for you; you are an ingenious 
gentleman, all the world must allow you and do 
allow you that, and you have a plentiful estate. 
Why should you render yourself unhappy by asso- 
ciating with such a simple people?" 

*'I confess," frankly answered Penn, '^I have 

44 



PENN BECOMES A MAN OF WEALTH 45 

made it my choice to relinquish the company of 
those that are ingeniously wicked, to converse with 
those that are more honestly simple." 

In those days men challenged each other to ar- 
guments over their religions much as they might 
have challenged each other to a duel. Penn en- 
joyed defending the Quaker cause in public. A 
Baptist preacher by the name of Ives denounced 
Penn and the Quakers in a sermon, and Penn 
sent him a challenge to argue the question in 
public. 

Ives did not appear at the meeting, but his 
brother took his place, and, according to the rules of 
such arguments, had to speak first. When he had 
finished his argument, he, with some friends, left the 
hall, hoping to draw so many people away with him 
that few would be left to Hsten to his opponent. 
But the audience stayed to hear Penn, and he spoke 
so eloquently that he won the house over to his 
side, and cost Ives the support of many of his fol- 
lowers. The young Quaker was proving as convinc- 
ing a speaker as he had already shown himself 
to be a vigorous writer. He was fast becoming a 
power in the new sect. 

He soon found a bigger man than Ives to argue 
with, for as he traveled through Oxfordshire preach- 
ing the Quaker cause he came to the University 



46 WILLIAM PENN 

of Oxford, where he had been a student, and learned 
that the young men there who were interested in 
Quakerism were treated worse than ever. The 
Vice Chancellor of Oxford thought that the Quakers 
might become a dangerous political party, and was 
doing all in his power to abolish the new religion. 
Penn wrote him a letter in which, with fiery ardor, 
he denounced the Vice Chancellor for his persecu- 
tion of Quaker students, and followed it up with 
other broadsides of attack on all who held similar 
views. He was a militant character, and when he 
argued before a pubHc meeting, or wrote a letter 
that was to be read by his opponents, he never 
hesitated to express himself as strongly as he knew 
how. So in his letter to the Vice Chancellor he 
gave himself free rein. He wrote: ^' Shall the mul- 
tiplied oppressions which thou continuest to heap 
upon innocent English people for their peaceable 
religious meetings pass unregarded by the Eternal 
God ? Dost thou think to escape his fierce wrath 
and dreadful vengeance for thy ungodly and illegal 
persecution of his poor children? I tell thee, no. 
Better were it for thee hadst thou never been born. 
Poor mushroom, wilt thou war against the Lord, 
and Hf t up thyself in battle against the Almighty ? 
Canst thou frustrate his holy purposes, and bring 
his determination to nought? He has decreed to 



PENN BECOMES A MAN OF WEALTH 47 

exalt himself by us, and to propagate his gospel 
to the ends of the earth." Fine, spirited words 
are these, worthy of the valiant courage of young 
William Penn ! 

Penn returned from Oxfordshire to London, and 
went one day to a meeting in Wheeler Street. He 
started to address the meeting, but no sooner had 
he begun than a sergeant marched in with a file of 
soldiers, dragged him from the platform, and car- 
ried him off to the Tower. That evening an officer 
and some musketeers marched him from the 
Tower to Sir John Robinson, the lieutenant, who 
asked him many questions, trying to make it ap- 
pear that Penn was a dangerous man, who, unless 
he were checked, might turn out to be another 
Cromwell. Sir John, knowing that the Quakers 
were opposed to all oaths, called on Penn to swear 
that he would never take up arms against the king, 
and also to take a solemn oath that he would never 
try to make any change of government either in 
church or state. This oath Penn refused to take, 
saying that the Quakers were opposed to all fighting 
as well as oath-taking. ''If I cannot fight against 
any man (much less against the king)," said he, 
''what need I to take an oath not to do it? Should 
I swear not to do what is already against my con- 
science to do ? " 



48 WILLIAM PENN 

Sir John and the other judges sneered at him, 
told him that he was bringing an honorable name 
to disgrace, and treated his principles with haughty 
contempt. Finally Sir John said, *'But you do 
nothing but stir up the people to sedition ; and one 
of your friends told me that you preached sedition 
and meddled with the government." 

Penn looked these accusers squarely in the face. 
''We have the unhappiness to be misrepresented," 
he answered, *'and I am not the least concerned 
therein. Bring me the man that will dare to justify 
this accusation to my face, and if I am not able to 
make it appear that it is both my practice and all 
my friends' to instill principles of peace and modera- 
tion (and only war against spiritual wickedness, 
that all men may be brought to fear God and work 
righteousness), I shall contentedly undergo the 
severest punishment all your laws can expose me 
to. 

" As for the king, I make this ofTer, that if any 
living can make it appear, directly or indirectly, 
from the time I have been called a Quaker (since 
from thence you date me seditious), I have con- 
trived or acted anything injurious to his person, or 
the English government, I shall submit my person 
to your utmost cruelties, and esteem them all but 
a due recompense. It is hard that I, being inno- 



PENN BECOMES A MAN OF WEALTH 49 

cent, should be reputed guilty ; but the will of God 
be done. I accept of bad reports as well as good." 

But he could not make Sir John and the other 
judges believe in his innocence. ^'You will be 
the heading of parties and drawing people after 
you," said Sir John, doggedly, and ordered Penn 
taken to Newgate, the worst prison in London, 
where Quakers were herded with criminals of the 
lowest types. 

People with money could hire rooms for them- 
selves at Newgate and so avoid some of the discom- 
forts of that vile place, and Penn spoke to his jailers 
about having a private room, but they answered 
him so abusively and insultingly and charged him 
so much for a private room that he said he pre- 
ferred to share the lot of the poorest criminals. 
And there this man of wealth and education bravely 
stayed for six months, writing a number of essays 
and a spirited reHgious pamphlet. When the 
authorities thought the incorrigible young man 
must surely have learned his lesson in the wretched 
prison, they set him free again. He had spent 
half of the last three years in jails. 

When he was at length liberated, he went abroad 
for a time, traveling in Holland and Germany, 
perhaps because his stay in Newgate had injured 
his health, perhaps to give the suspicions concern- 



so WILLIAM PENN 

ing him a chance to disappear. Yet, even on these 
journeys, whenever Penn found people showing 
any interest in the Quaker faith, he stopped and ex- 
plained it fully to them. But in most places the 
new sect was looked upon as something very 
strange, and its members were suspected of designs 
against the government, so very few were anxious 
to learn about it. 

In the autumn of 167 1 Penn returned to England, 
and, for the first time in a number of years, lived a 
quiet life, giving over preaching and arguing and 
writing fiery pamphlets. He was twenty-seven 
years old, and he had fallen in love with a Quaker 
girl named Gulielma Maria Springett, or, as she was 
called by her friends, Guli Springett. Penn now 
busied himself in looking about for a suitable home 
in which to start housekeeping. 

The father of William Penn's sweetheart was a 
young Puritan officer, who had been killed when 
only twenty-three years old at the siege of Bamber. 
Guli was born a few weeks later. Her mother, like 
many other people at that time, was neither satis- 
fied with the rehgion of the Church of England 
nor that of the Puritans. Some time after her 
husband's death she married Isaac Pennington, 
and both became Quakers. So Guli was brought 
up in the new religion. They all lived quietly in 



PENN BECOMES A MAN OF WEALTH 51 

Buckinghamshire until his neighbors began to com- 
plain to the authorities that Isaac Pennington was 
''talking Quaker doctrines." Then he was put in 
prison, and his wife and GuH wandered from one 
place to another. 

Guli had a considerable fortune, and her charms 
brought her many suitors, even though her step- 
father had fallen under the displeasure of the 
government. But she preferred the young and 
ardent Quaker who had himself suffered imprison- 
ment so often in the same good cause ; and in the 
spring of 1672 Guli and William were married. 
They made their home in the country, at Rick- 
mansworth in Hertfordshire. They were com- 
fortably well-to-do, and as the marriage was a 
very happy one, it might have been predicted that 
William Penn would become a prosperous country 
squire and have done with all religious discussions 
that were so Hkely to lead to a cell in the Tower 
of London. 

At about the same time the king, Charles II., 
issued a proclamation, which was known as the 
Declaration of Indulgence, by the terms of which 
he did away with all the laws against the Quakers, 
Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics, and all 
who dissented from the Church of England. There 
was only one objection to this decree, and that was 



52 WILLIAM PENN 

that the king issued it by his own act, and without 
the approval of ParHament, which meant that 
Charles II. had it in mind to try to rule without 
Parliament if it could be managed. The Declara- 
tion of Indulgence released over four hundred 
Quakers from prison, and in view of that benefit 
Penn and others were willing to overlook for the 
time the king's attempt to rule solely by his own 
will. 

From his home in the country Penn began to 
make short trips through Kent and Sussex and 
Surrey, preaching the Quaker doctrines, a free lance 
who served without pay and purely because he 
loved the work. Occasionally he took his wife 
with him on his travels. They went together to 
Bristol to welcome the Quaker leader George Fox 
on his return from America, and hear from him 
what progress the new faith was making in the 
strange new country across the Atlantic Ocean. 

By this time the Quakers had gained so many 
converts that the other sects were beginning to be 
afraid of them, and continually challenged them to 
more and more of those strange public debates 
in which the speakers did not hesitate to call their 
opponents harsh names. It was said of Penn that 
''he never turned his back in the day of battle," 
and he apparently threw himself into these argu- 



PENN BECOMES A MAN OF WEALTH 53 

ments with the same ardor his ancestors had 
shown in warfare. Besides taking up the cudgel 
in defense of the new creed, he wrote many pam- 
phlets and letters to people who disapproved of 
the Quakers. In this way he kept himself very 
busy during the two years he lived at his charming 
country home. 

Charles II. 's Declaration of Indulgence proved so 
unpopular with the Parliament that the king 
had soon to withdraw it, and then the old opposi- 
tion to all rivals of the Church of England broke 
out more violently than ever. George Fox was 
arrested and kept in prison for a year. The king 
offered to give him a pardon, but the Quakers were 
unwilling to accept pardons, as that would imply 
that they had really done something that was 
wrong. But Fox was ill, and Penn and some others 
went to court and tried to secure the favor of the 
Duke of York in behalf of Fox. The duke was 
very friendly to Penn, as he had been to Penn's 
father, but he did nothing to free Fox. However, 
the Quakers soon afterward secured the release of 
their leader by an appeal to the law courts. 

Then a man named Richard Baxter happened to 
go to Rickmansworth and found the place *' abound- 
ing with Quakers," as he put it, ^'because Mr. W. 
Penn, their captain, dwelleth there." Baxter 



54 WILLIAM PENN 

wanted to redeem these people from their errors and 
challenged Penn to an argument. They debated 
from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, 
before a great crowd, and at the end of that time 
all present held to their original views, although 
each debater claimed the victory. Penn enjoyed 
this argument immensely, for he told Baxter he 
would like to give him a room in his house, so 
''that I could visit and get discourse with thee in 
much tender love." But Baxter did not accept 
that invitation, and soon afterward Mrs. Penn in- 
herited a house and estate at Worminghurst, in 
Sussex, so she and her husband moved their home to 
that place. A little later Penn, with George Fox 
and other Quakers, set out on a missionary visit 
to Holland and Germany. 



CHAPTER VII 
Penn in Politics 

People in Holland and Germany, as well as in 
England, had now felt the new spirit of rehgious 
Kberty, so that William Penn and George Fox 
found more men and women in those countries 
eager to Hsten to their teachings than they had 
found elsewhere. The Quaker leaders traveled 
from one town to another, meeting many people, 
giving them copies of the pamphlets that Penn 
and others had written, and urging them to join 
the new Society of Friends. The Quaker mission- 
aries met with considerable success, although by 
no means all the people who listened to them be- 
came Quakers, but many joined one or another of 
the new sects that were springing up at the time. 

When he returned to England, Penn found the 
condition of the Quakers there as unsatisfactory 
as ever. The majority of the English people were 
so afraid that King Charles II. wanted to turn the 
country over to the Catholics that they were mak- 
ing the laws more and more strict against all who 

55 



56 WILLIAM PENN 

were not members of the Church of England, and 
this, of course, included the Quakers. They were 
being fined and imprisoned right and left, and 
treated worse than if they had no reUgion at all. 

As it was against the Quaker rule to take an oath 
of any kind, members of the new sect were at a great 
disadvantage in courts of law and in all places 
where an oath of allegiance to the government was 
required. To help them in this difficulty, Penn 
succeeded in inducing the House of Commons to 
allow Quakers to affirm instead of taking an oath, 
but before he could succeed in having the House 
of Lords pass the same bill the king dissolved 
ParHament. 

Then, in the summer of 1678, occurred what was 
known as the Popish Plot. This plot was probably 
largely invented by a man named Titus Oates, who 
claimed that he had discovered evidence that the 
CathoHcs intended to seize the government of 
England, kill the king and the leading statesmen, 
set fire to the shipping on the Thames, at a given 
signal murder all the Protestants, and seize Ireland 
with a French army. The people were so excited 
that they were willing to beHeve even such a wild 
story as Titus Oates told them, and immediately 
the authorities began to arrest and imprison Catho- 
Hcs as zealously as they had been imprisoning 



PENN IN POLITICS 57 

Quakers. The Quakers kept out of the dispute 
between the Church of England and the Catholics 
as well as they could, following the advice of Penn, 
who told his people to keep away from all worldly 
controversies. "Fly as for your lives," he wrote 
them in a letter, ''from the snares therein, and get 
you into your watch-tower, the name of the Lord." 
He urged the Protestants to treat the followers of 
other creeds more fairly, trying to show them that 
in their persecution of others the Protestants were 
themselves guilty of doing the very things which 
they had most feared from others. 

Penn could advise others to keep out of worldly 
discussions, but he found it hard to do so himself. 
His nature was too bold and energetic, and he was 
above all things else a pubHc man. So he tried to 
help his friend Algernon Sydney win a seat in the 
House of Commons, and, as a Whig, used all his 
influence to win success for that party in the elec- 
tions. Sydney was defeated, but WilUam Penn 
now became known as something of a poHtician as 
well as a religious leader. 

In 1680 Penn began to work out a plan that had 
been in the minds of George Fox and other Quakers 
for some time, namely, to obtain from the king a 
grant of land in America where the Quakers might 
establish a settlement for themselves. They had 



58 WILLIAM PENN 

already seen the Puritans cross the Atlantic and 
found the colony of Massachusetts Bay, where they 
were free to establish their own religion, and they 
had seen the Catholics go to Maryland under the 
guidance of Lord Baltimore. The Quakers were 
having a hard time of it at home ; why should they 
not choose a new land where they could do as they 
pleased? They were not welcome in Massachu- 
setts, where some of them had been hung and some 
whipped at the tail of a cart. Virginia was being 
settled by members of the Church of England, 
Maryland by the Catholics, and the Dutch were in 
possession of New York. They looked about to 
find some territory not yet well occupied. 

Some time earlier George Fox had considered 
founding a Quaker colony in the country lying 
north of Maryland and west of New York and the 
Jerseys. Travelers reported that this was easy 
to reach by a broad river called the Delaware. 
Penn already knew a good deal about this and the 
neighboring country, partly from George Fox, 
and partly because he had already acted as arbi- 
trator in a dispute as to the boundary line between 
East Jersey and West Jersey. He had also helped 
to draw up the constitution for West Jersey, and, 
as that constitution established religious liberty in 
that territory, many Quakers had gone there to 



PENN IN POLITICS 59 

live. Indeed, West Jersey might have become a 
great Quaker colony had it not been that men who 
went out there reported that its soil was not so 
fertile nor its general character so attractive as the 
land that lay farther to the west. 

In spite of the difficulties he had so often experi- 
enced with the law courts, Penn was now looked 
upon with favor by both King Charles and his 
brother the Duke of York. His father, Sir William, 
had never been paid all the money that was due him 
as a naval officer ; the government was therefore in 
debt to Penn to the amount of £16,000, and Penn 
knew that the king was always hard pressed for 
money to keep up his very expensive court. Penn 
knew also that the king would make difficulties 
about paying him the money that was owed, but 
he thought that Charles might be glad to give 
him some of the unoccupied land in North America 
in place of payment in money. Therefore he now, 
in 1680, sent a petition to King Charles asking 
that in payment of the money owed to his father he 
be granted a tract of land '^bounded on the east 
by the Delaware River, on the west limited as 
Maryland, and northward to extend as far as 
plantable." 

The petition was referred to a committee of the 
Privy Council, where much discussion followed as 



6o WILLIAM PENN 

to whether such a grant would not conflict with 
other grants to some of the New England colonies. 
There was much confusion in the plans, and great 
doubt as to the boundaries of Maryland. But 
when the grant was finally made to Penn, it covered 
a vast stretch of territory, including more than 
forty thousand square miles of land, the largest 
grant that had ever been made to one person in 
America. The tract was larger than Ireland, 
and not very much smaller than all of England. 
One reason for such liberality on the part of the 
king may have been that it canceled a debt of con- 
siderable money ; another reason was that Charles 
was particularly well disposed toward the son of 
his friend Admiral Penn. 

Now let us learn how our great State of Pennsyl- 
vania was named. On March 4, 1681, the king 
signed the charter. Penn wrote, ^'This day my 
country was confirmed to me under the great seal 
of England, with large powers and privileges, by 
the name of Pennsylvania ; a name the King would 
give it in honor of my father. I chose New Wales, 
being as this is a pretty hilly country, but Penn 
being Welsh for a head, as Pennanmoire in Wales, 
and Penrith in Cumberland, and Penn in Bucking- 
hamshire, the highest land in England, called this 
Pennsylvania, which is the high or head woodlands ; 



PENN IN POLITICS 6i 

for I proposed when the secretary, a Welshman, 
refused to have it called New Wales, Sylvania, and 
they added Penn to it ; and though I much opposed 
it, and went to the King to have it struck out and 
altered, he said it was past and would take it upon 
him ; nor could twenty guineas move the under sec- 
retary to vary the name ; for I feared lest it should 
be looked on as a vanity in me, and not as a respect 
in the King, as it truly was, to my father, whom he 
often mentions with praise." 

So, in spite of William Penn's modesty, the new 
colony was christened, as it were by chance, one of 
the most beautiful names in all the new continent. 

Penn owned the new colony much as the lord of 
an English manor owns his estate. The land be- 
longed to him, and the colonists were in reality 
to be his tenants, paying him rent for their right 
to use the land. Penn, on his part, was to pay 
two beaver skins to the king each year at his castle 
of Windsor, and the king was also to have one 
fifth of all the gold and silver that might be found 
in Pennsylvania. 

The charter set forth the form of government for 
the province. The people were to elect delegates 
who should pass laws, and Penn was to have the 
right to veto such laws as he did not approve. He 
had the right to appoint judges and other officers 



62 WILLIAM PENN 

and to grant pardons for crimes. He was to be 
the perpetual governor of the province, but if he 
chose to remain in England, he might govern the 
colony by a deputy whom he should send out in 
his place. 

A month after the charter was granted to him 
Penn sent his cousin, William Markham, who was 
a son of Admiral Perm's sister, to Pennsylvania, 
to take temporary charge of the few scattered fam- 
ilies of Swedes, English, and Dutch, who were living 
along the shores of the Delaware. Markham ar- 
rived at the colony in July, 1681, and established 
his home at Upland, a settlement some fifteen 
miles below the site of the present city of Phila- 
delphia. Markham examined the province, and 
sent word to Penn that Lord Baltimore disputed the 
boundary hues between Maryland and Pennsyl- 
vania, and that, if his claim was correct, Maryland 
would cut into a large section of southern Penn- 
sylvania. Penn then went to the Duke of York 
and secured from him an additional grant that 
gave him land now forming part of the state of 
Delaware. What he wanted was to obtain control 
of the entire western shore of the Delaware River 
from his province down to the Atlantic Ocean. 

Then he advertised for settlers for his new do- 
main, warning them that, for a few years at least, 



PENN IN POLITICS 63 

they would have to do without some of the com- 
forts of England, but explaining that it was a 
glorious opportunity to spread English influence in 
a new world. He offered them very easy terms of 
rent ; they could have five thousand acres by pay- 
ing £100^ and a shilling rent for every hundred 
acres annually afterward. If they did not have 
the money to take up so large a tract of land, they 
could have two hundred acres or less for the rent 
of one shilling an acre. These terms were very 
attractive, and many persons who were eager to 
take a share in what Penn was pleased to call ''his 
holy experiment of Pennsylvania," appKed for 
tracts of land in the new colony. 

Penn was now a very practical, businesslike man, 
and he meant to add to his fortune by means of 
his new province, and also to become a man of 
great influence. He intended to show that a peo- 
ple like the Quakers could build up a community 
where liberty should be the watchword, where war 
should be frowned upon, and where every man 
should have a chance to own land and cultivate it. 
He was not a dreamer only, but a great planner 
and organizer as well, one of those men who seized 
the opportunity that the new world of America 
presented, and hoped that he might there set 
right the wrongs that had brought so much trouble 



64 WILLIAM PENN 

to the poorer classes in Europe. There was prob- 
ably no finer type of man among those who settled 
the colonies of North America than this broad- 
minded, well-balanced, shrewd, and yet ideal- 
loving Quaker courtier, with his profound sense of 
justice, and his determination to deal fairly by all, 
— both settlers and Indians. 

Some men came to him offering to form a com- 
pany and pay him £6000 in return for a monopoly 
of the trade with the Indians in his province, but 
this he refused. He had his own ideas as to how 
he and his settlers must deal with the Indians; 
they must deal with them fairly ; and since they 
were to take land that belonged to the Indians, 
they must pay for every acre they occupied in their 
settlements and farms. This was a new idea, and 
not the usual custom, since most colonists paid no 
regard whatever to any right the Indians might 
have to their lands. He wrote out a set of rules 
for dealing with the Indians, and among them it 
was stated that a white man who injured an 
Indian was to be dealt with exactly as if he had 
injured another white man ; and that all disputes 
between the two races were to be adjusted by a 
jury of twelve men, six settlers and six Indians. 
A man who tried to obtain some special privileges 
from him paid him the following noble tribute : *'I 



PENN IN POLITICS 65 

believe he truly does aim more at justice and 
righteousness, and spreading of truth, than at his 
own particular gain." 

Meantime, several ships carrying settlers started 
for America, and Penn sent out three agents to 
choose a site for a town and deal with the Indians 
of the neighborhood. He told these agents to ex- 
amine the different creeks on the Pennsylvania 
side of the Delaware River in order to choose one 
that should allow boats to go up into the country. 
To use his own words, he ordered them, *'to settle 
a great town, and be sure to make your choice 
where it is most navigable, high, dry, and healthy ; 
that is, where most ships may best ride, of deepest 
draught of water, if possible to load or unload at 
the bank or quay side, without boating or lighter- 
age." 

When the agents arrived, they found that the 
settlers already there knew the best situation for a 
great settlement, — at a place a few miles north 
of where the Schuylkill River flowed into the Dela- 
ware. This place they named Philadelphia, a 
word that means ^'Brotherly love." 

What pleasure and satisfaction Penn must have 
taken in planning how this new town should be 
built ! He outlined it very carefully, directing 
where the markets and storehouses should be 



66 WILLIAM PENN 

placed, and telling his agents to choose a site in 
the center of the Kne of houses facing the river for 
his own residence. ''Let every house be placed," 
he suggested, "if the person pleases, in the middle 
of its plat, as to the breadth of it, that so there may 
be ground on each side for gardens, or orchards, 
or fields, that it may be a green country town, 
which will never be burnt and always wholesome." 
From that comes the name of ''Penn's green coun- 
try town" that was so often applied to Philadelphia 
in the early years of its existence. 

Penn sent a special letter to the Indians. "Now 
the great God hath been pleased to make me con- 
cerned in your part of the world, " he wrote them, 
''and the King of the country where I live hath 
given me a great province therein; but I desire 
to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we may 
always live together as neighbors and friends; 
else what would the great God do to us who hath 
made us (not to devour and destroy one another, 
but) to live soberly and kindly together in the 
world?" 

Penn was now such a prominent figure in England, 
the owner of a great tract of land given him by the 
king, that he was able to help those Quakers who 
got into trouble with the government; and when 
he was not busy planning his colony, he was usually 



PENN IN POLITICS 



67 



helping some persecuted members of his faith, and 
urging them to join him in his new province where 
liberty in religion was to be the keynote. He also 
drew up a constitution for Pennsylvania, and then, 
in the summer of 1682, he was ready to set sail for 
his new domain. 




Penn's Seal. 



CHAPTER VIII 

First Visit to Pennsylvania 

The proprietor of the new province sailed from 
Deal, in England, on August 30, 1682, leaving 
his wife and children at their home in the country. 
His ship was the Welcome and carried about one 
hundred passengers. The voyage across the Atlan- 
tic took nearly two months, for it was the 24th day 
of October when the Welcome sighted the capes of 
the Delaware. During the voyage thirty of the 
passengers died of smallpox, a common sickness 
for a ship to carry in those days. 

The Welcome took three days to sail up the 
Delaware to New Castle, which was the chief settle- 
ment thereabouts. This place was in the terri- 
tory that had been granted to Penn by the Duke 
of York, and here the agents of the duke gave the 
title to the land to its new owner in their master's 
name by the old ceremony of ''turf and twig and 
water," a custom long continued in Pennsylvania, 
and which meant that the former owner, by giving 
the new owner a piece of turf, a bit of twig, and a 

68 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 69 

cup of water, transferred to him full possession of 
whatever was to be found on the land in question. 

After this ceremony Penn sailed on up the river 
to the small village of Upland, where his agent, 
William Markham, was waiting for him. When he 
had landed at Upland, he asked his friend Pearson 
to choose a name for the town there, and Pearson, 
who hailed from the town of Chester in England, 
gave the settlement the name of that English place. 

From Chester William Penn began to explore his 
new possessions. He found a soil that was rich, 
woods and fields filled with animals and birds of 
many kinds, and a wide river with many tributary 
streams that led far into the interior of his prov- 
ince. Along the Delaware wild birds were plenti- 
ful, and every day Indians brought deer from the 
forests and sold them to the settlers for small 
amounts of tobacco. The settlers who were 
already living in the clearings along the Delaware 
were chiefly Swedes and Dutch, with a few English, 
who fished in the river, hunted in the bays, and 
pastured their cattle in the open meadows along 
the river banks. 

Penn was rowed in a barge up the Delaware past 
a place called Old Tinicum, which had been the 
residence of the Swedish governor, past that point 
where the Schuylkill joins the Delaware at what 



70 WILLIAM PENN 

is now League Island, and on to a stretch where 
the Delaware grew narrower and deeper and where 
there was high land with a good frontage for deep- 
draft boats. Here the shore was covered with 
pines, chestnuts, walnuts, oaks, and laurel, and a 
small stream flowed into the river. This was the 
place that Penn's commissioners had chosen for the 
site of his city. He landed at the mouth of the 
small stream called Dock Creek, which to-day flows 
into the sewer under Dock Street, on the water 
front of Philadelphia, and where then stood a log 
tavern known as " The Sign of the Blue Anchor." 
Tradition says that some EngHsh settlers and In- 
dians were on the shore to greet the new owner, and 
that he sat down with the Indians and ate the 
hominy and roasted acorns that they offered him. 
Then they indulged in some athletic sports for 
his entertainment, and Penn himself took part in a 
jumping match. Tradition has it that he out- 
jumped the best of the natives ! «. 

He Hked the site of his ''green country town" 
very much, and also the plans that had been made 
by his agents. Some of the names they had given 
to streets he changed. He altered Pool to Walnut 
and Winn to Chestnut Street, because of the trees 
that grew near those thoroughfares. One of the 
main roads he named High Street, which was later 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 71 

changed to Market Street. He planned the open 
square at Broad and Market streets where the 
City Hall now stands, but he intended to have it 
include ten acres of ground. He left a wide 
boulevard along the Delaware River, and staked 
out the city on the plan of a checkerboard, leaving 
four open spaces, which were later given the names 
of Washington, FrankUn, Rittenhouse, and Logan 
squares. 

Hardly had Penn outHned the map of what he 
hoped his little village of Philadelphia would grow 
to be, than he set about planning for the education 
of the people he was urging to follow him from 
Europe. He had induced Wilham Bradford, a 
printer of Leicester, England, to make the sea 
voyage with him, and set up a printing-press in 
the province. In December, 1683, Enoch Flower 
opened a school in a two-room shack built of pine 
and cedar planks, and six years later a pubHc 
school was founded, to be known in time as the 
William Penn Charter School, destined to continue 
to the present day. Although the post ofhce had 
existed in England for only a few years, Penn 
thought it so valuable that he issued orders to 
have a post office installed in his province with 
deliveries once a week, and letters were sent at 
the very reasonable cost of twopence from Philadel- 



72 WILLIAM PENN 

phia to Chester and sixpence from Philadelphia to 
Maryland. 

The first frame building that had been completed 
in Philadelphia was the "Blue Anchor/' which 
was at one and the same time an inn, an exchange, 
a corn market, a post office, and a landing-place. 
It stood fronting the river, and was built of heavy 
rafters of wood and bricks that were brought from 
England. The colonists were men of energy and 
resource ; they built substantial houses rapidly, and 
before long residences with pointed roofs, balconies, 
and porches were common sights, while an enter- 
prising man named Carpenter built a quay three 
hundred feet long, where a ship of five hundred 
tons could be moored. Penn was justly proud of 
the achievements of his colonists. To Lord 
Halifax he wrote, "I must without vanity say, I 
have led the greatest colony into America that ever 
any man did on private credit; " while to Lord 
Sunderland he said, "With the help of God and such 
noble friends, I will show a province in seven years 
equal to her neighbor's of forty years' planting." 

When he had started men to work on his new 
city, Penn traveled through West and East Jersey, 
saw Long Island, and incidentally stopped and 
preached to any Quakers he found in that part of 
North America. It used to be supposed that he 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 73 

made his famous treaty with the Indians at Ken- 
sington at about that time, but historians now 
believe that it was not made until the following year. 
As soon as his new government was in order, the 
owner of the province of Pennsylvania, accom- 
panied by his council, went to Maryland to discuss 
the boundary line with Lord Baltimore. The 
two proprietors met at West River, but could 
reach no satisfactory adjustments. Then Penn 
returned to his own colony and spent the winter 
in the little settlement of Chester. By this time 
other ships were bringing Quakers to Pennsylvania ; 
twenty-three vessels had arrived within a short 
time, and their passengers were made very wel- 
come by the settlers who were already estabHshed. 
The young proprietor — he was only thirty-eight 
years old — must have enjoyed his experience in 
his new country, if we may judge from his letters. 
He wrote to his wife, ^'0 how sweet is the quiet of 
these parts, freed from the anxious and trouble- 
some solicitations, hurries, and perplexities of 
woeful Europe!" And again he wrote, "I like 
it so well that a plentiful estate, and a great ac- 
quaintance on the other side, have no charms to 
remove ; my family being once fixed with me, and 
if no other thing occur, I am Uke to be an adopted 
American." 



74 



WILLIAM PENN 



In the spring he was very busy overseeing the 
building of the houses of Philadelphia, and moved 
from Chester to what was known as the Letitia 
House in Philadelphia. This house had been built 
for him facing the river south of what is now 
Market Street, in a lot that contained about half 
a city block. The house was built of brick and 
was later given by Penn to his daughter Letitia. 




\ .;•« 






The Letitia House. 



While the newly arrived settlers were building 
their frame houses, they lived in huts of bark and 
turf, and some even in caves excavated in the 
steeper parts of the river bank. There was none 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 75 

of the famine and illness, and few of the hardships, 
that attended the early settlements in Massachu- 
setts and Virginia. There was plenty of game to 
be had in the woods and along the river, stone for 
buildings was plentiful, and the clay beds under 
the soil provided material for bricks. The colony 
was comfortable and prosperous, and Penn's system 
of government had been so well planned that laws 
were made and enforced with very Httle friction. 

Sometimes Penn himself presided over the meet- 
ings of the Provincial Council, which frequently 
sat as a court of law. One of the early trials was 
for witchcraft among the Swedes, and was handled 
so quickly and decisively that the old superstition 
was prevented from spreading among the people, 
as it did in Massachusetts a Httle later. Penn 
charged the jury, which brought in a verdict that 
the prisoner was ''guilty of the common fame of 
being a witch ; but not guilty in manner and form 
as she stands indicted." As this amounted to 
deciding that the prisoner was not guilty of having 
done any wrong, in spite of her reputation for 
dealing in witchcraft, a precedent was set which 
showed that Pennsylvania was to be fair in dealing 
with all kinds of men and women. 

Every one is familiar with Benjamin West's 
famous picture of Penn making a treaty with the 



76 WILLIAM PENN 

Indians under the great elm at Kensington. That 
scene, however, like many other striking scenes 
in history, seems to rest on vague tradition rather 
than on facts. There is no exact record of his 
first treaty with the Indians, but the place where it 
was made is generally supposed to have been on the 
bank of the Delaware River near the foot of what 
is now called Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia. 
This treaty was simply an agreement as to the 
method of buying the land and how it should be 
surveyed. Later, deeds were drawn up for the 
actual transfer of the lands, and the tracts to be 
transferred were surveyed by the old method of 
walking against time. Thus it was agreed that 
what was known as the Neshaminy tract should 
reach beyond the mouth of the Neshaminy Creek 
''as far as a man could walk and back in three 
days." 

How this was done was described by John Wat- 
son. '' Governor Penn," said he, ''with several 
Friends and a party of Indians, began in the month 
of November at the mouth of the Neshaminy and 
walked up the Delaware. In a day and a half 
they arrived at a point about thirty miles distant 
at the mouth of a creek which they called 'Baker's' 
(from the name of the man who first reached it). 
Here they marked a spruce tree ; and Governor 




Reproduced from BuelVs " William Penn," through the courtesy of D. Appleton 

Company. Originally printed in Watson's " Annals of Philadelphia." 

The Treaty Tree. 

Under this tree William Penn is supposed to have made his first treaty 
with the Indians. The tree was blown down in 1810, when it was found 
to be 283 years old. During the winter of 1778, when Philadelphia was 
occupied by the British, their foraging parties were sent out in every 
direction for fuel. To protect this famous old tree from the ax, Colonel 
Simcoe, of the Queen's Rangers, placed a sentinel under it, and thus its 
life was spared for many years. 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 77 

Penn decided that this was as much land as would 
be immediately wanted for settlement, and walked 
no farther. They walked at leisure, the Indians 
sitting down sometimes to smoke their pipes and 
the white men to eat biscuit and cheese. ... A 
line was afterward run from the spruce tree to 
Neshaminy and marked, the remainder was left 
to be walked out when wanted for settlement." 

This unusual method of measuring land appears 
to have been fair enough, at least as long as William 
Penn was in authority over the white settlers. 
The Indians had already learned that they could 
trust him, and found no cause for raising the war- 
cry against the ''Children of Mignon" (Elder 
Brother), as the followers of William Penn were 
called. Half a century later, however, when 
William Penn's son Thomas was the governor, 
the Lenni-Lenape, or Delaware Indians, from whom 
Penn had bought much land, became uneasy at 
the encroachments of some of the settlers, and 
asked to have a distance, stated in the old agree- 
ment to be ''as far as a man can go in a day and a 
half," definitely determined. Thomas Penn, the 
governor of Pennsylvania, and the chiefs of the 
Delawares agreed that the distance should be 
determined by a walk to take place on September 
19, 1737. Very early on that morning a large 



78 WILLIAM PENN 

number of colonists gathered at the crossroads 
near the Friends' meetinghouse at Wrightstown 
in Pennsylvania. 

A large chestnut tree stood at the crossroads, 
and this was the center of interest for the white 
men and for the Indians who joined them there. 
^' Ready!" commanded Sheriff Smith, and at the 
word three white men stepped out from the crowd 
and put their right hands on the chestnut tree. 
The three were James Yeates, a New Englander, 
described as "tall, slim, of much ability and speed 
of foot " ; Solomon Jennings, "a, remarkably stout 
and strong man," and Edward Marshall, a well- 
known hunter, who was over six feet tall, and noted 
as a great walker. 

Governor Thomas Penn had promised to give 
five pounds in money and five hundred acres of 
land to the walker who should cover the greatest 
distance, and these three had entered the contest 
for the prize. As the sheriff gave the word to start 
the three men were off. Yeates took the lead, 
followed by Jennings, beside whom walked two 
Indians to see that the walking was fair. After 
them came men on horseback, among whom were 
the sheriff and the surveyor general, and at a little 
distance Governor Thomas Penn himself. At the 
back of the procession came Edward Marshall, 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 79 

walking easily, swinging a hatchet in his hand, 
'Ho balance himself," as he said, and munching 
dry biscuits that he took from his pocket. He 
had said in advance that he would ''win the 
prize of five hundred acres of land, or lose his life 
in the attempt," but he walked as if he had for- 
gotten that determination. 

The walkers pushed steadily on, never at a loss 
for direction, for Thomas Penn had secretly sent 
out a surveying party in advance to blaze the trees 
along a straight line for as great a distance as it 
was thought possible for a man to walk in eighteen 
hours. Therefore even when they reached the 
wilderness the walkers had the straightest course 
marked out for them. Then the Indians began to 
protest against the increasing speed of the white 
men, saying again and again, "That's not fair. 
You are running ! You were to wa/^." In answer 
the white men only said that the treaty had used 
the words, "As far as a man can go," and there- 
fore they had a right to run if they wished. Pres- 
ently the Indians tried to delay the march by 
stopping to rest, but the horsemen who were with 
the party dismounted and insisted on the Indians 
riding their horses, and so the "march" continued 
as rapidly as ever. At last the Indians refused to 
go any farther, and left the white men. 



So WILLIAM PENN 

Solomon Jennings was tired out before the 
Lehigh River was reached, and left the race to the 
other two, following for a time with some of the 
spectators. 

That night the walking party slept on the north 
side of the Lehigh Mountains. In the morning 
some of the white men hunted for the horses that 
had strayed from camp during the night, while 
others went to the village to ask the chief to send 
other Indians to accompany the white walkers. 
The chief answered angrily, ''You have all the 
good land now, and you may as well take the bad, 
too." Another Indian, who had heard how the 
white men had raced along, trying to get as much 
land as possible, said disgustedly, ''No sit down to 
smoke; no shoot squirrel; but lun, lun, lun, all 
day long !" 

The last half-day's walk had hardly begun when 
James Yeates dropped out, finding the exertion of 
such a rapid pace too much for him. Marshall, 
however, still pressed on, travehng very fast. 
When he passed the last of the trees that had been 
blazed to guide them, he took a compass held out to 
him by the surveyor general, who was riding, and 
kept his direction by its aid. At last the sheriff, 
looking at his watch, called out, "Halt!" Mar- 
shall threw himself forward, and grasped a sapling. 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 8 1 

That point then became the mark for the northern 
boundary of the purchase made many years before, 
a mark that was sixty-eight miles from the chest- 
nut tree at the crossroads at Wrightstown, and 
close to the site of the present town of Mauch 
Chunk. The distance covered had been twice 
as great as the Indians had supposed it would 
be. 

In another way also the Delawares, who knew 
little of legal matters, were tricked by Thomas 
Penn's officers. The deed that set forth the 
purchase did not state in what direction the 
northern boundary was to be drawn, but the 
Indians had naturally expected that it would be 
run to the nearest point on the Delaware River. 
The surveyor general, however, decided that the 
line should be drawn at right angles to the direc- 
tion of the walk, which was almost straight north- 
west. If a Hne were drawn from the town of 
Mauch Chunk to the Delaware so that if it were 
extended it would reach New York City, that line 
would represent what the Indians thought the 
northern boundary should be. But if a Hne be 
drawn from Mauch Chunk to the point where New 
York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet, the 
result will be the boundary that Thomas Penn's 
surveyor general actually marked out four days 



82 WILLIAM PENN 

after Edward Marshall finished his remarkable 
walk. As a result the amount of land that was 
taken from the Indians under this purchase was 
increased from the three hundred thousand acres 
they thought they should give to half a milHon 
acres, and all because white men took a selfish ad- 
vantage of a loosely worded deed ! 

The Delawares, or Lenni-Lenape, had always 
trusted William Penn, because he had been scru- 
pulously fair with them. They had said, ''We will 
live in love with William Penn and his children as 
long as the sun and moon shall shine." The result 
of this ''Walking Purchase" in 1737, however, 
which took away from the tribe all the land along 
the river from which they took their name, was to 
embitter them against the white men, and destroy 
the friendship that William Penn had been so care- 
ful to create between the two races. 

It is pleasant to remember that the settlers of 
William Penn's time paid the Indians when they 
made purchases of land. There is a record of the 
sale of what was called the "Salem tract," a piece 
of land with a frontage of twenty-four miles on the 
Delaware and extending back far enough to include 
over eight hundred square miles. For this, it is 
related, the Indians received the following curious 
assortment of articles in payment : 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 83 

"30 match-coats, 20 guns, 30 kettles, i great kettle, 30 
pair of hose, 20 fathoms of duffels, 30 petticoats, 30 narrow 
hoes, 30 bars of lead, 15 small barrels of powder, 70 knives, 
30 Indian axes, 70 combs, 60 pair of tobacco tongs, 60 pair 
of scissors, 60 tinshaw looking-glasses, 120 awl-blades, 120 
fish-hooks, 2 grasps of red paint, 120 needles, 60 tobacco 
boxes, 120 pipes, 200 bells, 100 Jew's-harps, and 6 ankers 
of rum." 

A great deal of oratory was expended on the 
making of these treaties. Penn wrote of one of 
them, ''When the purchase was agreed, great 
promises passed between us, of kindness and good 
neighbourhood, and that the Indians and EngHsh 
must live in love as long as the sun gave Hght : 
which done, another made a speech to the Indians, 
in the name of all the Sachamakan, or kings, first 
to tell them what was done ; next, to charge and 
command them to love the Christians, and partic- 
ularly Uve in peace with me and the people under 
my government; that many governors had been 
in the river, but that no governor had come himself 
to live and stay here before ; and having now such 
an one that had treated them well, they should 
never do him or his any wrong. At every sentence 
of which they shouted, and said, Amen, in their 
way." 

Usually in making these treaties a belt of wam- 
pum was given to an Indian with an injunction to 



84 WILLIAM PENN 

remember a certain clause of the agreement, so 
that when the Indians wished to refresh their 
minds in regard to any of the treaties, they would 
gather together, and as each displayed his belt of 
wampum he would recite the agreement that the 
white men had made when they gave the belt to the 
native. 




Penn's Wampum Belt. 

In general, William Penn's treaties simply prom- 
ised that the Indians should be fairly treated, and 
that they should have redress from the colony's 
government in case any settler cheated them. 
Similar treaties had been made between the settlers 
and the natives for years in that neighborhood and 
in other parts of North America. The only thing 
that made Penn's treaties really remarkable was 
that the Quaker proprietor actually kept his prom- 
ises. The Indians came to regard this as remark- 
able, after they had dealt with other white men, 
and spread the word that Penn, or Onas, as the 
Iroquois called him, or Mignon, as the Delawares 
called him, was really a man of his word. In 
time this unusual reputation of WilHam Penn 



FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA 85 

Spread across the sea to England and to France. 
In both countries the reputation for dealing hon- 
estly with the Indians caused great surprise, 
mixed, fortunately, with great admiration for the 
white governor. Voltaire, the famous French 
writer, said of Penn^s agreement, ''This was the 
only treaty between these people and the Chris- 
tians that was not ratified by an oath and that was 
never broken." 



CHAPTER IX 
What Penn found in America 

During his stay in Pennsylvania William Penn 
wrote often to his family and friends in England. 
These letters give us a vivid picture of the new 
world of America, for they were written by a very 
keen observer and an unusually well-educated man. 
They show us the virgin country from which were 
to grow the homes of a new nation. 

"I find the country wholesome," he wrote, "land, air, 
and water good, divers good sorts of wood and fruits that 
grow wild, of which plums, peaches and grapes are three; 
also cedar, chestnut and black walnut and poplar, with 
five sorts of oak, black and white, Spanish, red and swamp 
oak the most durable of all, the leaf like the English 
willow. 

"We have laid out a town a mile long, and two miles deep. 
On each side of the town runs a navigable river, the least 
as broad as the Thames at Woolwich, the other about a mile 
over. I think we have near about eighty houses built, and 
about three hundred farmers settled around the town. I 
fancy it aheady pleasanter than the Weald of Kent, our 
being clearer, and the country not much closer; a coach 
might be driven twenty miles end-ways. We have had fifty 

86 



WHAT PENN FOUND IN AMERICA 87 

sail of ships and small vessels, since the last summer in our 
river, which shows a good beginning." 

Penn was very proud of the natural riches of his 
new country. 

"Here is a hickory-nut tree," he wrote, "mighty large, 
and more tough than our ash, the finest white and flaming 
fire I have ever seen. I have had better venison, bigger, 
more tender, and as fat as in England. Turkeys of the 
wood, 8 had of forty and fifty pounds weight. Fish in 
abundance hereaways yet as I hear of, but oysters, that 
are monstrous for bigness, though there be a lesser sort." 

The climate was a matter of the greatest interest 
to him. 

"For the seasons of the year," he said, "having by God's 
goodness now lived over the coldest and hottest that the 
oldest liver in the province can remember, I can say some- 
thing to an English understanding. 

" First of the fall, for then I came in. I found it from the 
24th of October to the beginning of December, as we have it 
usually in England in September, or rather like an English 
mild spring. From December to the beginning of the month 
called March, we had sharp frosty weather ; not foul, thick, 
black weather, as our northeast winds bring with them in 
England, but a sky as clear as in the summer, and the air 
dry, cold, piercing, and hungry ; yet I remember not that I 
wore more clothes than in England. The reason of this 
cold is given from the great lakes, which are fed by the 
fountains of Canada. The winter before was as mild, scarce 
any ice at all, while this for a few days froze up our great 



88 WILLIAM PENN 

river Delaware. From that month to the month called 
June we enjoyed a sweet spring ; no gusts, but gentle showers 
and a fine sky. Yet this I observe, that the winds here, as 
there, are more inconstant, spring and fall, upon that turn 
of nature, than in summer or winter. From thence to this 
present month, August, which endeth the summer, com- 
monly speaking, we have had extraordinary heats, yet miti- 
gated sometimes by cool breezes." 

Penn found the Indians as yet unspoiled by 
traffic with the settlers, and his opinion of them 
must stand as one of the very best ever given. He 
wrote : 

"They are generally tall, straight, well built, and of 
singular proportion; they tread strong and clever, and 
mostly walk with a lofty chin. Of complexion black, but 
by design, as the gypsies in England. They grease them- 
selves with bear's fat clarified ; and using no defense against 
sun and weather, their skins must needs be swarthy. Their 
eye is little and black, not unlike a straight-looked Jew. 
The thick lip and flat nose, so frequent with the East 
Indians and blacks, are not common to them; for I have 
seen as comely European-like faces among them, of both 
sexes, as on your side the sea; and truly an Italian com- 
plexion hath not much more of the white; and the noses 
of several of them have as much of the Roman. 

"Their language is lofty, yet narrow; but, like the 
Hebrew in signification, full. Like short-hand in writing, 
one word serveth in the place of three, and the rest are 
supplied by the understanding of the hearer ; imperfect in 
their tenses, wanting in their moods, participles, adverbs. 



WHAT PENN FOUND IN AMERICA 89 

conjunctions, interjections. I have made it my business to 
understand it, that I might not want an interpreter on any 
occasion ; and I must say that I know not a language spoken 
in Europe, that hath words of more sweetness or greatness, 
in accent and emphasis, than theirs ; for instance, Octococ- 
kon, Rancocas, Oricton, Shak, Marian, Poquesian, all which 
are names of places, and have grandeur in them. . . . 

"Of their customs and manners there is much to be said. 
I will begin with children. So soon as they are born they 
wash them in water, and while very young, and in cold 
weather to choose, they plunge them in the rivers to harden 
and embolden them. Having wrapt them in a clout, they 
lay them on a straight thin board a little more than the length 
and breadth of the child, and swaddle it fast upon the board 
to make it straight ; wherefore all Indians have fiat heads ; 
and thus they carry them at their backs. The children will 
go very young, at nine months commonly. They wear only 
a small clout round their waist till they are big. If boys, 
they go a-fishing till ripe for the woods, which is about fifteen. 
Then they hunt; and, having given some proofs of their 
manhood by a good return of skins, they may marry : else it 
is a shame to think of a wife. The girls stay with their 
mothers, and help to hoe the ground, plant corn, and carry 
burthens ; and they do well to use them to that, while young, 
which they must do when they are old; for the wives are 
the true servants of the husbands : otherwise the men are 
very affectionate to them. . . . 

"Their houses are mats or barks of trees, set on poles in 
the fashion of an English barn, but out of the power of the 
winds, for they are hardly higher than a man. They lie 
on reeds or grass. In travel they lodge in the woods about 
a great fire, with the mantle of dufiils " [a coarse woolen cloth] 



90 WILLIAM PENN 

" they wear by day wrapt about them, and a few boughs 
stuck round them. 

"Their diet is maize or Indian corn divers ways prepared, 
sometimes roasted in the ashes, sometimes beaten and boiled 
with water, which they call homine. They also make cakes 
not unpleasant to eat. They have likewise several sorts 
of beans and peas that are good nourishment : and the woods 
and rivers are their larder. . . . 

''But in liberality they excel. Nothing is too good for 
their friend. Give them a fine gun, coat, or other thing, 
it may pass twenty hands before it sticks : light of heart, 
strong affections, but soon spent : the most merry creatures 
that Hve: they feast and dance perpetually; they never 
have much, nor want much. Wealth circulateth like the 
blood. All parts partake; and though none shall want 
what another hath, yet exact observers of property. Some 
kings have sold, others presented, me with several parcels 
of land. The pay or presents I made them were not hoarded 
by the particular owners; but the neighboring kings and 
their clans being present when the goods were brought out, 
the parties chiefly concerned consulted what, and to whom, 
they should give them. To every king, then, by the hands 
of a person for that work appointed, is a proportion sent, 
so sorted and folded, and with that gravity which is admi- 
rable. Then that king subdivided it in like manner among 
his dependents, they hardly leaving themselves an equal 
share with one of their subjects : and be it on such occasions 
as festivals, or at their common meals, the kings distribute, 
and to themselves last. They care for little, because they 
want but Uttle: and the reason is, a Httle contents them. 
In this they are sufficiently revenged on us. If they are 
ignorant of our pleasures, they are also free from our pains. 



WHAT PENN FOUND IN AMERICA 91 

They are not disquieted with bills of lading and exchange, 
nor perplexed with Chancery suits and Exchequer reckon- 
ings. We sweat and toil to live. Their pleasure feeds 
them ; I mean their hunting, fishing, and fowling, and this 
table is spread everywhere." . 

It would have been fortunate for settlers in other 
colonies if they had taken the same friendly view 
of the Indians that Penn did, and, finding the 
natives a different race from themselves, had 
made allowances for those differences. 

As Penn was on good terms with the Indians so 
he was with the men of other races who had settled 
near his province. He Hked the Dutch and the 
Swedes as well as the English. He wrote of those 
who had located in his territory : 

"The first planters in these parts were the Dutch, and 
soon after them the Swedes and Finns. The Dutch ap- 
plied themselves to traffic, the Swedes and Finns to hus- 
bandry. There were some disputes between them for 
some years; the Dutch looking upon them as intruders 
upon their purchase and possession, which was finally 
ended in the surrender made by John Rizeing, the Swedish 
Governor, to Peter Stuyvesant, Governor for the States of 
Holland, anno 1655. 

"The Dutch inhabit mosdy those parts of the province 
that He upon or near the Bay, the Swedes the Freshes ^ of 
the River Delaware. 

iThe "Freshes" of the Delaware were the low-lying meadows 
along the river. The Swedes built their homes on the upland 



92 



WILLIAM PENN 



''There is no need of giving any description of them, who 
are better known there than here; but they are a plain, 
strong, industrious people, yet have made no great progress 
in culture, or propagation of fruit-trees ; as if they desired 
rather to have enough than plenty or traffic. . . . They 
kindly received me as well as the English, who were few 
before the people connected with me came among them. I 
must needs commend their respect to authority, and kind 
behavior to the English. They do not degenerate from the 
old friendship between both kingdoms. As they are people 
proper and strong of body, so they have fine children, and 
almost every house full : rare to find one of them without 
three or four boys and as many girls ; some six, seven, and 
eight sons. And I must do them that right, I see few young 
men more sober and laborious." 

It was in the summer of 1683 when Penn had 
written home that fifty vessels had arrived during 
the past year, that about eighty houses had been 
built in Philadelphia, and some three hundred 
farms were under cultivation in the near neighbor- 
hood. It is estimated that about three thousand 
settlers had now arrived. Penn himself made a 
long horseback trip into the country, meeting 
many Indians, living in their wigwams, learning 

portions and pastured their cattle in the low lands. Their interest 
centered on the river which provided them with a seemingly in- 
exhaustible supply of fish and game, and on the rich grass of the 
river meadows where no trees had to be cleared away to provide 
pasture-land. 



WHAT PENN FOUND IN AMERICA 93 

something of their language, and continually gain- 
ing their good will and friendship. After this 
journey he wrote a long letter to the Free Society 
of Traders, in which he described the country in 
detail, and gave remarkably accurate accounts of 
the trees and flowers, the soil and climate, of his 
great province. 

He loved an outdoor Hfe, and was so delighted 
with his new domain that he planned, and later 
built, a country home for himself about twenty 
miles above Philadelphia, near where Bristol is 
now situated. This place he called Pennsbury. 
He did not have a chance to do more than plan it 
at this time, for the boundary disputes with Lord 
Baltimore had now been referred to the Privy 
Council in London, and Penn felt that he must go 
there himself to represent his claims, and also to 
see his family. So he left his colony on August 16, 
1684, sailing in a small ship called a ketch, and 
reached England after a seven weeks' voyage. 



CHAPTER X 

Troublous Days in England 

Penn found himself in a curious position when 
he arrived in England. He was a great man, the 
governor of a large colony which was reputed to be 
extraordinarily rich, and at the same time he was 
one of the leaders of a sect which was once more 
frowned upon and disliked by both the king and 
the court. As he himself said, "One day I was 
received well at court as proprietor and governor 
of a province of the crown, the next taken up at a 
meeting by Hilton and Collingwood, and the third 
smoakt " [smoked out or hunted out] '^ and 
informed of for meeting with the men of the whig 
stamp." 

He went to see King Charles and the Duke of 
York, but, though they were glad to see their 
former friend, they both now felt that the troubles 
besetting their government were largely due to 
dissenting religious parties, and that the Quakers 
were among the chief of these dissenters. Penn 
saw that he must not lose the good opinion of the 

94 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND 95 

king if he were to have any success in his dispute 
with Lord Baltimore, a nobleman who had great 
influence at court ; at the same time he found that 
many Quakers were being ill-treated for their re- 
ligion and felt called upon to help them. The 
case of one man in particular appealed to him, 
Richard Vickris, a quiet man who had been sen- 
tenced to execution because he refused to take an 
oath and who had broken certain statutes for the 
suppression of dissenters. This case Penn appealed 
to the Duke of York, and the latter finally secured 
Vickris's pardon from the king. 

In the midst of this confused state of affairs in 
England, the easy-going, pleasure-loving Charles 
II. died, and his brother, the Duke of York, became 
king as James II. The new king could make fair 
promises to his friends, and when William Penn 
spoke to him about the Quakers, the king promised 
to show all sorts of favors to them. He had a 
great deal to say about liberty and about religious 
toleration. 

When the Quakers sent him a petition for clem- 
ency, setting forth that there were then thirteen 
hundred of their creed in prison in England, and 
that hundreds had died of prison hardships in the 
past few years, the king was much concerned, and 
showed his concern by setting free all dissenters 



96 WILLIAM PENN 

who were in prison, including both the Quakers 
and the Roman CathoKcs. Probably the king 
thought to strengthen himself on the throne by 
this act of clemency ; certainly it was providential 
for the Quakers who had been separated from their 
families and friends for years, and undoubtedly it 
made Penn feel very grateful to his sovereign. 

Strange as it may seem, there must have been 
a real intimacy between the straightforward and 
outspoken Penn and the crafty and double-deal- 
ing king. Gerard Croese, who wrote the history 
of the early Quakers, dwelt upon this strange 
friendship. ^'WilHam Penn," he quaintly says, 
*' was greatly in favor with the King — the Quaker's 
sole patron at court — on whom the hateful eyes 
of his enemies were intent. The king loved him as 
a singular and entire friend, and imparted to him 
many of his secrets and counsels. He often hon- 
ored him with his company in private, discoursing 
with him of various affairs, and that, not for one, 
but many hours together, and delaying to hear the 
best of his peers who at the same time were waiting 
for an audience. One of these being envious, and 
impatient of delay, and taking it as an affront to 
see the other more regarded than himself, adven- 
tured to take the freedom to tell his majesty, that 
when he met with Penn he thought little of his 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND 97 

nobility. The King made no other reply than 
that Penn always talked ingenuously, and he heard 
him willingly." 

- Then the young Duke of Monmouth raised a 
rebellion and tried to seize the throne. Many 
Protestants joined his cause, but he was defeated, 
and there followed the slaughter of all who had 
sided with Monmouth, or who were even sus- 
pected of siding with him. The cruel Judge Jef- 
freys went through the country leaving a trail of 
gibbeted heads and ruined homes behind him, 
thereby bringing the Catholic king and his court in 
more disfavor than ever with the great Protestant 
majority of the people. But Penn did not desert 
the king, although he must have hated the blood- 
shed that James tolerated in his officers. ''The 
King," said he, "was much to be pitied, for he was 
hurried into all this effusion of blood by Jeffreys' 
impetuous and cruel temper." He advised the 
Quakers to keep quiet and refrain from mixing in 
public affairs. And meantime he himself used all 
his influence to protect those who fell under sus- 
picion of disloyalty to the Crown. 

The Quakers were glad enough to have a friend 
at court, and there was no doubt but that Penn 
was a very influential man. In those days there 
were many men with some standing at court who 

H 



98 WILLIAM PENN 

were known as "pardon-brokers"; men whose 
business it was to obtain pardons for persons 
accused of crimes, usually exacting payment of all 
the accused person's wealth in return. Penn used 
his influence to obtain pardons only because of his 
belief in the innocence of the man or woman under 
accusation, and this honesty of his, in an age when 
treachery and deceit were the usual standards, 
made him more than ever a marked and notable 
man. 

He soon had so many "clients," as those wHb 
sought favors of an influential man were called, 
that he felt obliged to rent Holland House, the 
London residence of the Earl of Warwick, and he 
had his own coach and four horses, as well as other 
luxuries that befitted his position as an intimate 
friend of the king. These expenses, and the money 
he was continually giving to his needy Quaker 
friends, soon began to be a heavy drain on his for- 
tune, and again and again he spoke of wishing he 
could move his family to the new home in Pennsyl- 
vania, taking up there the simple and free life that 
he had enjoyed so much on his first visit. But his 
dispute with Lord Baltimore was not yet settled, 
and he felt too great a responsibility for the Quakers 
in England to leave London then; he doubtless 
also enjoyed his new prominence as a courtier ; for 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND 99 

Penn, in spite of his Quaker simplicity, was in 
many ways a man who thoroughly appreciated 
power and influence and the good report of the 
world. 

Matters of state were growing more and more 
tangled in England. The king was appointing 
Roman Catholics to office, and was not as well 
disposed toward the men of the Church of Eng- 
land as the Protestants thought proper. On all 
sides men and women were plotting for their own 
advancement, too often changing their religion to 
suit their ambitions of the moment. Penn, who 
would preach to a Quaker meeting, and then go to 
the king's chambers, where he would meet Cath- 
olics and priests, seemed to be acting after the 
general fashion of the time, but nevertheless his 
intimacy with the king caused gossip and some 
suspicions of his motives. 

He trod a very difficult path in those days, often 
seeming to be "carrying water on both shoulders." 
In the summer of 1686 he made another journey to 
Holland and Germany, and in the former country 
Penn went to see WiUiam, the Prince of Orange, 
bearing messages, some historians say, from King 
James to William. This Prince of Orange had 
married Mary, the daughter of James 11. of Eng- 
land, and Mary was next in line of succession to 



loo WILLIAM PENN 

the English throne. Penn's mission seems to have 
been to persuade William and Mary that there 
should be religious freedom in England, as King 
James had proclaimed it, and to this William, who 
was an ardent Protestant, was only too glad to 
agree. But when he found that his father-in-law's 
religious freedom was likely to end in turning 
England over to the Pope, he was much less en- 
thusiastic, and did not altogether rehsh the argu- 
ments made to him by the Quaker envoy Penn. 
William himself believed that Penn was an honest 
man, perhaps hoodwinked by the clever courtiers 
around King James, but some other people in 
Holland were not so sure of this, and suspected 
Penn of being at heart a Catholic, and even spread 
that report concerning him. Many of the followers 
of the Prince of Orange — men who were to go 
with him to England later when he became king of 
that country — despised and distrusted the Quaker, 
and Penn seemed unable to set himself right before 
them. He was getting deeper and deeper into the 
toils of his peculiar position, for he wished to show 
himself a sincere Quaker, yet he appeared to be 
acting in the interest of the Church of Rome. 

In Holland he met some Presbyterian refugees 
from Scotland, among them Sir Robert Stuart, of 
Coltness. When he returned to England, Penn 



m 



THE HOLY 



BIBLE, 



d<e Old .-v.i .V-j 



TESTAMENTS, 



Nc^-ly Tranflaccil ouc of the 
Orieinal Tongues , and with 

(I'c ^.iiix-rri.ii-ll.itions diliw 

gtntiy Compared and 

Rcvifcd. 




With Marginal Notes, 



*riie Scripture ro rlie belt Intcrfretcr x 

of Scripture. 



RevToduced from Fisher's " Tfie True William Penn," through the courtesy of the 

J. B. Lippincott Company . 

William Penn's Bjble and Book-plate. 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND loi 

recommended that King James should allow these 
men to return, since they were in exile solely on ac- 
count of their religion, and were not guilty of any 
treason. The king consented, but when Sir Rob- 
ert Stuart did return, he found that he was penni- 
less, because all his property had been given over 
to the Earl of Arran. Sir Robert went to Penn 
and told him the state of affairs. Penn took the 
matter up at once, and went to the Earl of Arran. 
The Earl of Buchan has described how Penn man- 
aged the matter. 

^^'Thou hast taken possession of Coltness's 
estate,' said Penn. 'Thou knowest that it is not 
thine.' 

"'That estate,' said Arran, 'I paid a great price 
for. I received no other reward for my expensive 
and troublesome embassy in France.' 

'''All very well, friend James, but of this assure 
thyself, that if thou dost not give me this moment 
an order on thy chamberlain for two hundred pounds 
to Coltness to carry him down to his native country, 
and a hundred a year to subsist on till matters are 
adjusted, I will make it as many thousands out of 
thy way with the King.'" 

So spoke Penn, and as- a result the Earl of Arran 
complied with Penn's request, and a little later 
the' entire estate was restored to Sir Robert Stuart. 



102 WILLIAM PENN 

Evidently men understood that William Penn had 
great influence with the king of England. 

When he returned from Holland, Penn found that 
the Quakers were increasing in numbers, and he 
often preached to as many as a thousand listeners 
at a single meeting. At the same time his steward 
and others in Pennsylvania were writing to him for 
more money, and he was sending them all he could 
spare, and more too, although, as he sometimes 
complained in his letters, he could not see why such 
a naturally wealthy province should require any 
help from him. He wrote that he would gladly 
go out to his province again, if it were not that the 
boundary dispute with Lord Baltimore kept him in 
England. But naturally he wanted his people 
there to make a profit for him out of his great 
possessions. *'If my table, cellar and stable may 
be provided for," he wrote, '^with a barge and 
yacht or sloop for the service of governor or govern- 
ment, I may try to get hence, for in the sight of 
God, I can say I am five thousand pounds behind- 
hand more than I ever received or saw for land in 
that province, and to be so baffled by the merchants 
is discouraging and not to be put up." 

In 1687, King James issued a Declaration of 
Indulgence which looked like a wonderful step 
forward for rehgious liberty. He abolished the 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND 103 

laws which prevented dissenters and Roman 
Catholics from sitting in Parliament or holding 
public office. This sounded well, but unfortunately 
James, like all the Stuart kings, insisted on acting 
of his own accord, without getting either the con- 
sent of Parliament or the approval of his people. 
Yet, in spite of this defect, the Declaration of In- 
dulgence was gladly accepted by most members 
of those sects that had so long been out of favor 
with the government, and the Quakers presented 
the king with an address, telling him how well his 
act was received throughout England. The king 
appeared to be pleased with what the Quakers 
said, and made them a grateful reply. ''Gentle- 
men," said he, "I thank you heartily for your 
address. Some of you know (I am sure you do, 
Mr. Penn,) that it was always my principle, that 
consciences ought not to be forced, and that all 
men ought to have the liberty of their consciences. 
And what I have promised in my declaration I will 
continue to perform so long as I live. And I hope 
before I die, to settle it, so that after ages shall have 
no reason to alter it." 

But if the Quakers were pleased at this act of 
the king, the Roman Catholics were even more 
delighted. Soon it became apparent that the 
latter were going to reap the greatest benefit 



104 WILLIAM PENN 

from this new act of clemency on the part of 
King James. 

As it became evident that the king meant to 
have his own way, in spite of Parliament or public 
opinion, and that his way was probably to turn the 
government over to the followers of the Church of 
Rome, the dissenters flocked to the aid of the 
Church of England. Much as Presbyterians, 
Baptists, Quakers, and other dissenting people 
disagreed with the EngHsh Established Church, 
they all felt that it was far preferable to the Church 
of Rome. They knew that King James was hand 
in glove with the Pope and with the French king, 
Louis XIV., and they could foresee that if their 
sovereign should have his way, the country might 
quickly return to the conditions of the reign of 
"Bloody Mary.'^ So practically all Protestants 
now opposed King James's illegal Declaration of 
Indulgence. But WiUiam Penn did not; he said 
he still trusted the king, and published a pamphlet 
entitled ''Good Advice to Roman Catholic and 
Protestant Dissenters," in which he supported the 
king, although he pubHshed the pamphlet anony- 
mously. Then he traveled over the country, trying 
to induce people to agree with his view of James. 

The king next tried to seize the universities of 
Oxford and Cambridge for the Catholics. He 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND 105 

made over to them Christ Church College and 
University College at Oxford, and when there was a 
vacancy in the office of president of Magdalen 
College, he ordered the fellows to elect a CathoKc. 

The fellows refused, and the king's officers broke 
down the college doors, turned out the president 
whom the fellows had elected, the fellows them- 
selves, and the students, and turned the place into 
a Papal seminary. At first Penn remonstrated 
with the king about this, but soon afterward he 
changed and advised the college to yield. Here 
Penn made a grievous mistake ; no wonder people 
began to think that the former champion of 
religious liberty was no longer a Quaker at heart. 

King James went on with his schemes. He was 
growing so bold that he tried to run all the counties 
and boroughs, and force people to choose his own 
favorites for their officers. Wherever he could he 
turned out the old officers and put in his Catholic 
friends. Then, in April, 1688, he made another 
blunder. He issued another Declaration of In- 
dulgence very similar to his first one, and said 
that he would appoint no one to pubHc office 
except those who would support him in maintain- 
ing this indulgence, and then ordered that this new 
law should be read on two successive Sundays by 
the clergymen in all the churches of England. 



Io6 WILLIAM PENN 

He meant in this way to humiliate the Church of 
England. But James had now gone too far. Only 
a few clergymen read the new Declaration, and in 
most cases where they did, the people left the 
churches as soon as they heard the first words of it. 
Seven bishops petitioned the king not to enforce 
his order to have the act read, and King James had 
these seven tried for libel, and imprisoned them 
in the Tower of London while they were awaiting 
trial because they refused to give bail. This was 
what became famous as the Case of the Seven 
Bishops, and roused men all over England to the 
wildest pitch of indignation. Penn opposed this 
arrest of the seven bishops, but he still acted as a 
friend of the king and tried to plead his cause. 

About the same time a son was born to the king 
and queen, and the English people thought this 
meant that the Catholics would secure control of 
the government for the next reign. They were 
determined that this should not be, and so they 
invited William, the Protestant Prince of Orange, 
and his wife Mary, the daughter of James II., to 
come and take the throne of England. William 
landed and took the crown with very little opposi- 
tion. James, deserted by his court, his army, and 
his navy, threw the Great Seal of England into the 
river Thames, and fled to France, where he lived 



TROUBLOUS DAYS IN ENGLAND 107 

the remainder of his days in a palace given to him 
by Louis XIV. 

England was now in a much better way. The 
country had an honest king and queen who shortly 
proclaimed a religious liberty that was sincere. 
But Penn was under a cloud of suspicion. Men 
said that King James had sent him to William of 
Orange earHer to induce William to side with him 
in his Declaration of Indulgence, and men knew now 
that he was the author of that pamphlet "Good 
Advice to Roman Catholic and Protestant Dissen- 
ters" that had attempted to justify King James. 
Some of Penn's friends urged him to clear himself 
of the charges that were being spread concerning 
him. They told him that his own consciousness of 
innocence was giving him too great a contempt for 
the slanders and gossip that were rife about him. 
But in reply Penn only protested his friendship for 
James and his belief in the king's fairness, al- 
though it had become plain to the rest of the 
world that James was an unscrupulous deceiver. 

His final reason for his unwavering support of 
James lay in these words of his: "To this let me 
add the relation my father had to this king's serv- 
ice, his particular favor in getting me released 
out of the Tower of London in 1669, my father's 
humble request to him upon his death-bed to pro- 



io8 WILLIAM PENN 

tect me from the inconveniences and troubles my 
persuasion '' [creed] " might expose me to, and his 
friendly promise to do it and exact performance 
of it from the moment I addressed myself to him ; 
I say when all this is considered, anybody that has 
the least pretence to good nature, gratitude, or 
generosity, must needs know how to interpret my 
access to the king." 

And that was probably the true explanation of 
William Penn's devotion to an unjust king, — his 
gratitude to a man who had been the friend of 
both his father and himself. That same strong 
trait of friendship was shown time and again in 
Penn's dealings with agents in Pennsylvania who, 
relying on his friendship, deceived him. It was, 
perhaps, a noble trait; but it placed this Quaker 
leader, a man who had fought so long and so 
earnestly to secure religious freedom in England, in 
the curious position of friend and supporter of a 
sovereign who had been doing his best to suppress 
liberty of religion. It is small wonder that many 
people in England failed to understand Penn's 
attitude ; and small wonder that, when William and 
Mary came to the throne, Penn stood in a dis- 
credited and very difficult position. 



CHAPTER XI 

Penn in Disfavor 

The new king of England, William III., was an 
honest, upright man, and made a fine ruler, in 
many ways one of the very finest that England has 
ever had. The government had been very cor- 
rupt under the last two Stuart kings; under 
William and Mary it became respectable. William 
had already made the small country of the Nether- 
lands a power in the world, and had fought valiantly 
to defend the Protestant cause. When he became 
king of the much stronger country of England, he 
said to a friend, "At last I have a weapon whose 
blows will hurt!" He meant that he could now 
do more than ever for religious freedom. 

And he did more for religious freedom than any 
king of England ever had done. He did not make 
promises only to break them, nor play off one party 
against another for his own selfish aims. He found 
the country a very network of intrigue and plot- 
ting, and he straightened it out as speedily as he 
could. He was a colder, more reserved man than 
109 



no WILLIAM PENN 

either Charles, the "Merry Monarch/^ or James 
II. had been, and he had of course to make a great 
many changes in the government, so that it fol- 
lowed quite naturally that those men who were 
used to the two Stuart kings were not altogether 
pleased with William. Penn was one of those men ; 
having been fond of Charles and James, he did not 
take kindly to WilHam; and he allowed himself 
to appear almost an enemy to the new ruling 
house. 

Now King WilHam, although he had no par- 
ticular affection for the Quaker leader, was quite 
ready to be perfectly fair with him. He would 
probably have been glad to ask Penn's advice in 
regard to matters that concerned the Quakers, had 
not an unfortunate accident happened which placed 
Penn under suspicion. The exiled King James 
wrote a letter to Penn from France ; and, as King 
William's spies were careful to trace all the letters 
James sent to England, it soon became known that 
Penn had been receiving messages from the exiled 
king. The first thing Penn knew he was served 
with an order to appear before the Privy Council 
and answer to a charge of carrying on a treasonable 
correspondence. He was not frightened. He went 
at once to the Council, surrendered himself, and 
asked that he might be allowed to make his answer 



PENN IN DISFAVOR iii 

in the presence of the king. This was agreed to, 
and the meeting was set for the next day. 

William was gracious and kindly when the 
Quaker, hat in hand, appeared before him; and 
the king alluded to the pleasure he had had in 
meeting Mr. Penn at the Hague. Then he drew 
out the letter from King James that his spies had 
intercepted, and handed it to Penn, saying that the 
signature was undoubtedly that of James Stuart. 
He then asked Penn to read the letter aloud. This 
Penn did, and found that the letter reminded Penn 
of James's friendship for his father and for himself, 
and hoped that in its hour of need he would come 
to the aid of the Stuart cause. 

Penn handed the letter back to the king, who 
asked what King James meant by requesting Penn 
to come to his aid, and why James had written to 
him. Penn answered that it was impossible for 
him to prevent James writing to him, if the late 
king wished to do so. He then went on to admit 
that he had loved King James in his prosperity, and 
could not hate him now in his adversity ; that he 
was willing to repay his kindness in any private 
way he could; but that he had no thought of 
disloyalty to the new sovereign, and had never 
been guilty of any disloyal act. His defense was 
so manly and frank that William was willing to 



112 WILLIAM PENN 

discharge Penn at once, but, as some of his Council 
objected, the king ordered William Penn to give 
bail to appear at the next "Trinity term" of court, 
which began on May 22 and ended on June 
12. When Penn furnished this bail, he was 
given his liberty. 

Soon afterward King WiUiam went to Ireland 
to put down a rebellion that was being led by James 
and his followers, and in his absence Queen Mary 
took charge of the affairs of state. She Hstened 
to the stories of some men who were doubtless 
trying to gain her favor by slandering others, and 
caused the arrest of eighteen prominent men who 
were charged with conspiring '^to restore James 
Stuart to the throne of England." One of the 
names on the list was that of William Penn. He 
was arrested, and again released on bail. The 
case never came to trial, but these two charges 
were sufficient to keep him under the eye of the 
law, and force him to lead a secluded and careful 
life. Once let a man who had been as prominent 
and popular as William Penn fall into disfavor 
and scores of enemies will spring up to steal away 
his good name. So it was then, and many a time 
in the years that were to come he must have longed 
for the free, outdoor life of his colony across the 
seas where he had been so happy. 



PENN IN DISFAVOR 113 

After a time he began to plan to return to 
Pennsylvania, and advertised for more settlers to 
go out there with him. He was on the point of 
sailing when he learned by chance that another 
warrant had been issued for his arrest, and that al- 
ready the officers were looking for him. Probably he 
now despaired of clearing his name to the satisfac- 
tion of the government; in any event he decided 
on a new course ; he did not give himself up, but 
instead went into hiding, disappearing as if he were 
really afraid of trying to prove his innocence. 

No one knows exactly what became of Penn 
during those next three years. Some say that he 
took private lodgings in London, and explain that 
the great city was so full of little, hidden courts 
and narrow, twisting alleys that it was easy for a 
man to conceal himself there for a long time. 
Others say that he spent part of that time in France, 
and it seems likely that much of the time he was 
on the move, for he himself wrote in a letter, **I 
have been above these three years hunted up and 
down, and could never be allowed to live quietly 
in city or country." 

It was a most unfortunate situation for a man 
who had lived the upright life that William Penn 
had, and one who had done so much for liberty 
of conscience. It seems as if Penn must have 



114 WILLIAM PENN 

been afraid of the lying statements of enemies, 
and feared that their false words would outweigh 
the truth. There were then a number of men in 
England who made a good living by being ''in- 
formers," making up their charges out of whole 
cloth. Unscrupulous persons sometimes sought 
the help of such informers to put enemies out of 
the way. Penn wrote to a meeting of Quakers 
in London, "My privacy is not because men have 
sworn truly, but falsely, against me; 'for wicked 
men have laid in wait for me and false witnesses 
have laid to my charge things that I knew not. ' '' 
He also sent a letter to his friends in Pennsylvania, 
saying, "By this time thou wilt have heard of the 
renewal of my troubles, the only hinderance of my 
return, being in the midst of my preparations with 
a great company of adventurers when they came 
upon me. The jealousies of some and unworthy 
dealings of others have made way for them ; but 
under and over it all the ancient Rock has been my 
shelter and comfort; and I hope yet to see your 
faces with our ancient satisfaction." 

It hardly seems credible that Penn could have 
actually conspired against the new king and queen, 
and yet plots were much in the air in those days, 
and, as we have already seen, the Quaker leader 
could be rather easily influenced by people of whom 



PENN IN DISFAVOR 115 

he was fond. In any event, he seems at that time 
to have been treated as an object of suspicion, 
and at this distant date it cannot be said positively 
whether he deserved this suspicion or whether he 
was the unhappy victim of unscrupulous "in- 
formers." 

King WiUiam left England on a visit to the 
Hague, and in his absence another plot was dis- 
covered, this time to bring James over from France 
in the king's absence and seize London before the 
army could be ready to defend it. The plot was 
discovered before it had made any real headway. 
Bishop Burnet said, ''The men who laid this de- 
sign were the Earl of Clarendon, the Bishop of 
Ely, the Lord Preston, and his brother Mr. Gra- 
ham, and Penn, the famous Quaker." 

The first four of these men were really guilty, 
and one of them, Preston, being actually caught 
with the papers in his possession, saved his life 
by turning state's evidence, and in his confession 
named William Penn as one of the conspirators. 
So Penn was included in the order for the arrest 
of all the traitors. 

There was nothing to prove Penn guilty, so he 
simply kept up his poUcy of hiding. He did, how- 
ever, send his brother-in-law to Henry Sydney, an 
old friend of his who was high in favor with King 



Ii6 WILLIAM PENN 

William. Sydney agreed to meet Penn and hear 
his side of the matter. The two men met, and 
afterward Sydney wrote to the king and told him 
what Penn had said. The sum of this was that 
Penn was really a loyal subject of William's. He 
said that he was not plotting and knew of no plot, 
and only asked that the king would grant him an 
interview so that he might clear himself. .> 

Being busy in Ireland, the king could not see him 
at that time, and so Penn kept in concealment. 
A little later he wrote again to Sydney, urging 
him to beg the king not to believe all the unjust 
stories that were being spread concerning him. 
He said that he only desired to be allowed to live 
quietly in England or America, and added that the 
Quakers would vouch for his keeping quiet and 
doing no harm. He ended by saying that he felt 
that he had been very much mistreated, and that 
a less peaceable subject might almost have been 
driven to conspiracies by such hard usage. 

He did not dare, however, to give himself up 
for trial on any of the charges against him. He 
felt certain that he could explain away those 
charges if he might meet the king privately, but 
he would not stand an open trial in court. He 
said to Sydney, "Let me be believed and I am ready 
to appear ; but when I remember how they began 



PENN IN DISFAVOR 117 

to use me in Ireland upon corrupt evidence before 
this business, and what some ill people have 
threatened here, besides those under temptation, 
and the providences that have successively ap- 
peared for my preservation under this retirement, 
I can not, without unjustifiable presumption, put 
myself into the power of my enemies." It is a 
very strange and mixed-up situation, it being clear 
that Penn was afraid of what his enemies might 
show against him, though whether there was 
actually any good ground for their charges no one 
can positively say. 

He must have felt uneasy even when hiding in 
England, for presently he went to France. His- 
tory does not tell us what he did there, nor how long 
he remained. In the meantime King William took 
away from him the government of his province 
of Pennsylvania, and the rents of his estates in 
Ireland were declared confiscated. 

After some time the fugitive must have thought 
that the government might have become more 
friendly to him, for he tried to get Lord Rochester 
to make his peace with King William. He said 
that if the king would dismiss the charges against 
him, he would go back to Pennsylvania, although 
he would Hke first to go to Ireland and try to re- 
cover some of his ruined estates. There was now 



Ii8 WILLIAM PENN 

less fear of conspiracies of followers of James II. ; 
moreover, the government may well have thought 
that there was little danger to be feared from Penn ; 
and that they would be well rid of him if he would 
go to Pennsylvania and use his energies in straight- 
ening out matters there. Three noblemen, Lords 
Rochester, Ranelagh, and Romney, the new title 
of his friend Henry Sydney, saw the king on Penn's 
behalf. William was willing to be lenient. So 
Penn was able to write this interesting letter to his 
friends in his American colony : 

"This comes by the Pennsylvania Merchant, — Harrison, 
commander, and C. Saunders, merchant. By them and 
this know, that it hath pleased God to work my enlargement, 
by three Lords representing my case as not only hard, but 
oppressive; that there was nothing against me but what 
impostors, or those that are fled, or that have, since their 
pardon refused to verify (and asked me pardon for saying 
what they did), alleged against me; that they had long 
known me, some of them thirty years, and had never known 
me to do an ill thing, but many good offices ; and that for 
not being thought to go abroad in defiance of the Govern- 
ment, I might and would have done it two years ago ; and 
that I was, therefore, wilHng to wait to go about my affairs, 
as before, with leave ; that I might be the better respected in 
the liberty I took to follow it. 

"King William answered, 'That I was his old acquaint- 
ance, as well as theirs ; and that I might follow my business 
as freely as ever ; and that he had nothing to say to me,' — 



PENN IN DISFAVOR 119 

upon which they pressed him to command one of them to 
declare the same to the Secretary of State, Sir John Trench- 
ard, that if I came to him, or otherwise, he might signify 
the same to me, which he also did. The Lords were Roches- 
ter, Ranelagh, and Sydney ; and the last, as my greatest 
acquaintance, was to tell the Secretary ; accordingly he did ; 
and the Secretary, after speaking himself, and having it 
from King William's own mouth, appointed me a time to 
meet him at home ; and did with the Marquis of Winchester, 
and told me I was as free as ever ; and as he doubted not my 
prudence about my quiet living, for he assured me I should 
not be molested or injured in any of my affairs, at least while 
he held that post. The Secretary is my old friend, and one 
I served after the D. of Monmouth and Lord Russel's busi- 
ness ; I carried him in my coach to Windsor, and presented 
him to King James; and when the Revolution came, he 
bought my four horses that carried us. It was about three 
or four months before the Revolution. The Lords spoke 
the 25th of November, and he discharged me on the 30th. 

"From the Secretary I went to our meeting, at the Bull 
and Mouth ; thence to visit the sanctuary of my solitude ; 
and after that to see my poor wife and children ; the eldest 
being with me all this while. My wife is yet weakly ; but 
I am not without hopes of her recovery, who is of the best 
of wives and women." 

So Penn came out of his hiding and appeared 
again in the full light of London. We find a man 
named Narcissus Luttrell writing in his diary for 
December 5, 1693: ''Wm. Penn, the Quaker, 
having for some time absconded, and having com- 



I20 WILLIAM PENN 

promised the matters against him, appears now in 
public, and on Friday last held forth at the Bull 
and Mouth in St. Martin's." 

As he was always an active, energetic man, 
William Penn had been busy writing during the 
time of his concealment. He had written a number 
of new Quaker pamphlets, and also his famous 
collection of maxims called "Fruits of Solitude." 
In a wider and more interesting field he had also 
written "An Essay towards the Present Peace of 
Europe," in which he urged that all disputes 
between governments be settled by a court of 
arbitration, and that a United States of Europe, 
with a general council containing representatives 
of each nation, should be formed. 

It is said that Penn's devoted wife had gone to 
King James and his queen in France every year 
since he had lost his throne, and carried them 
tokens of devotion from their friends in England. 
She was always well received, and even the sup- 
porters of William could find Httle fault in so gra- 
cious an act. But Guli Penn said that she did 
this from friendship for the exiles, and not through 
any opposition to the new rulers of her land. 

Soon after Penn was free to live as he pleased 
his gentle wife died, leaving three children, 
Springett, William, and Letitia. They had been 



PENN IN DISFAVOR 1 21 

a devoted couple, and Penn found this loss a very 
hard one to bear. Difficulties of many sorts beset 
him. His fortune had been spent in various ways 
during the troubled days of his fall from favor, 
and he now looked across the sea, in the hope that 
he might find in his province of Pennsylvania some 
of the peace and satisfaction he had known there 
on his first visit, and had dreamed of from time to 
time ever since. 



CHAPTER XII 
Penn goes to America Again 

King William had taken the government of 
Pennsylvania away from William Penn probably 
because he thought that a colony governed by a 
Quaker friend of James Stuart might easily become 
a prey to French greed. But when the king and 
Penn became reconciled, the province was given 
back to Penn, in August, 1694. Although he was 
anxious to see his new city of Philadelphia again, 
it was not until five years later that Penn was able 
to cross the Atlantic. This was largely due to the 
fact that he had very little money left. 

His colony of Pennsylvania had cost him a great 
deal of money; and, although he had expected 
large returns from the land and natural products 
there, he found that the colony caused greater and 
greater leakage to his purse. The settlers would 
not pay even the very small quit-rent of one 
shilling a year for each hundred acres, and were 
constantly calling on Penn to help them. His 
estates in Ireland brought in no profits, and the 

122 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 123 

property at Worminghurst that had belonged to 
Mrs. Penn had been left in trust for her oldest son, 
Springett Penn, who was then about nineteen years 
old. All that Penn received from that property 
was enough to support and educate the three chil- 
dren. 

While he stayed in England he began preaching 
again, and found that now, under William and 
Mary, the Quakers were allowed the fullest liberty 
to hold their meetings, and that reHgious persecu- 
tion was a thing of the past. His preaching was 
very successful. Wherever he spoke great crowds 
gathered to hear the words of a man who had had 
such a remarkable history, who had been a close 
friend of King James, and who had been in hiding 
for some years. Penn was unquestionably a very 
eloquent speaker, and his many experiences must 
have added very much to the interest of what he 
had to tell the quiet-living Quakers of the English 
countryside. 

Three years after his first wife died Penn married 
again, this time Hannah Callowhill, of Bristol. 
Soon afterward he lost his oldest child, Springett, 
a boy of great charm and a close companion of 
his father. Of Guli Penn's two other children, 
William became dissipated and was a great dis- 
appointment to Penn, and Letitia married William 



124 WILLIAM PENN 

Aubrey, who turned out to be a very disagreeable 
son-in-law. By his second wife Penn had six 
children, four of whom, John, Thomas, Margaret, 
and Richard, ultimately became the joint owners 
of Pennsylvania. 

Penn now moved to the English city of Bristol, 
where he continued making plans for his province, 
and preaching and arguing with people who did 
not approve of his religion. The Quakers were then 
doing a certain amount of missionary work, and the 
story goes that Penn sought out a young Russian 
prince who was studying shipbuilding in England, 
and gave him Quaker books which he explained 
to him. In time this prince became the Emperor 
Peter the Great of Russia, and he is said always to 
have taken great interest in the Quakers because 
of what Penn had taught him. 

Meantime, much had happened in Pennsylvania. 
The history of the province had been full of ups and 
downs, many of its difficulties being due to the 
fact that for fifteen years Penn had been obliged 
to stay away from it. There had been many 
squabbles between the settlers and the men ap- 
pointed to govern the province, but in spite of 
disagreements the colony had grown until now 
there were nearly twenty thousand settlers there. 

When Penn left his colony in 1684, he had placed 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 125 

the power in the charge of a Council of eighteen 
men, and each of the eighteen had felt that it was 
his duty to do all the governing. When he learned 
that this system did not work well, Penn had tried 
to mend matters by doing away with the Council 
and appointing five commissioners. But this did 
not work very well, either, and in less than a year 
Penn appointed an old soldier of Cromwell's army. 
Captain John Blackwell, to replace the commis- 
sioners, and act as a deputy governor. The 
Quakers, however, did not like being in charge of 
a soldier, and made matters so difficult for Captain 
Blackwell that he resigned his post. Then followed 
another Council, and then another deputy governor, 
so that in ten years the form of government was 
changed no less than six times. 

When WilHam III. took the province away from 
Penn, he appointed a captain general. Colonel Ben- 
jamin Fletcher, who served until the colony was 
given back to Penn, a year and ten months later. 
Then Penn appointed his cousin, Markham, to be 
deputy governor, with two assistants. Markham, 
although he had a troubled time of it, managed to 
keep charge until William Penn was able to join 
him in 1699. ^^^ this time Penn had been paying 
salaries and spending money on his home at Penns- 
bury, and had been receiving nothing in return. 



126 WILLIAM PENN 

There was another reason for Penn's returning 
to his colony as soon as he could, and that was that 
King WilHam was growing impatient at the stories 
he heard of the misgovernment of Pennsylvania, 
and was determined that something should be done 
to put things on a more stable footing. So, under 
the urging of friends at court who knew the king's 
mind, Penn collected what money he could, and on 
September 9, 1699, embarked with his wife and 
his daughter Letitia on the ship Canterbury at 
Southampton. The voyage was long and stormy, 
but three months later — toward the end of No- 
vember — the ship reached the mouth of the Del- 
aware River. The ship was so slow in sailing up 
the river that when New Castle was reached, Penn 
left her and was rowed to Chester. 

Many settlers, hearing of the arrival of the 
proprietor of the province, flocked to Chester to 
greet him. Among them was a Quaker who had 
been well known in England, Thomas Story, who 
had traveled extensively in America. Penn and 
Story spent the night together at the house of 
Lydia Wade, near Chester, and Story told the 
proprietor all that had been happening in the 
province, including the scourge of yellow fever, or 
^'Barbadoes distemper," as it was often called, 
that had visited Philadelphia a short time before 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 127 

and proved fatal to more than two hundred 
people. 

Next day Penn returned to the Canterbury and 
sailed on up to Philadelphia. Here he landed, 
paid a short visit to Markham, the deputy gov- 
ernor, and then went to the Quaker meetinghouse, 
where he preached to a great congregation. 




The Slate-Roof House. (See Page 128.) 

He brought with him to Philadelphia a young 
man named James Logan, who acted as his secre- 
tary; in time Logan became Penn's chief repre- 
sentative, and one of the wisest of those who 
helped to govern the province. 



128 WILLIAM PENN 

Penn had no house of his own in Philadelphia, 
so he, with his wife, his daughter Letitia, and James 
Logan, stayed for a month at the house of Edward 
Shippen, and then moved to one of the largest 
houses of the town, then known as *' the slate-roof 
house" ; it stood on the east side of Second Street 
between Chestnut and Walnut. There his son 
John was born, and the boy was always affection- 
ately known as ''John the American.'^ 

Most of the people of Pennsylvania, and par- 
ticularly the Quakers, were very glad to have Penn 
with them again. He was a man well able to 
govern, but not generally successful in choosing 
others to govern for him. There was one man. 
Colonel Quarry, who had been sowing dissension 
and distrust of Penn in the province, but Penn 
sent for him, and after a talk. Quarry admitted 
that he had been wrong and the two became 
friends. One of the things Penn soon learned, a 
thing that seems strange enough to us, was that 
there was a good deal of piracy going on in the 
neighborhood of his province, and that many of 
the pirates were actually Hving in comfort in Phila- 
delphia! It did not take Penn long to get after 
these men, and he soon had them arrested and 
punished in a way that spoke well for his energy 
and zeal. Other crimes and wrongs he punished 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 129 

or corrected, and the Quakers soon found they 
were right in believing that their governor was as 
good an executive as he was a preacher. 

He was very busy that winter, holding meetings 
of his Council and passing new laws, preaching to 
Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, survey- 
ing a manor of ten thousand acres at Rockhill, in 
Bucks County, for his son John, and overseeing 
repairs to his country place at Pennsbury. Inci- 
dentally, it is interesting to recall that, liberal and 
freedom-loving as he was, it had not occurred to 
him to oppose the custom of holding negro slaves, for 
he himself had many slaves in his own employment. 

He urged the settlers to make their prisons not 
merely places of restraint but workhouses and 
reformatories, and as a result Pennsylvania prisons 
were far better managed than those in other colo- 
nies. He introduced the custom of having a night 
watchman go through the streets, calHng out the 
hour, the state of the weather, and any news of 
interest. In many ways he improved conditions, 
showing that he had a real genius for governing 
and an intense desire to make his province an ideal 
place in which to live. 

Early in the spring of 1700 he moved to his 
mansion at Pennsbury, twenty miles up the river. 
It was built of bricks, most of which had been 



ISO 



WILLIAM PENN 



brought from England, and it stood about one 
hundred rods from the bank of the Delaware. 

Back of it were deep 
forests, penetrated by 
only a few roads and 
trails. It was said to 
have cost £5000 to 
build, a very large 
sum for a house in the 
wilderness, but it was 
the most imposing 
residence to be found 
anywhere between 
the Hudson and Po- 
tomac rivers, and had 
few equals in New 
York or Virginia. 

The house had two 
stories, with a high 
attic for servants' 
rooms, and the main 
walls were eighteen 
inches thick. There was a large hall on the first 
floor, where Penn held meetings of his Council, 
gave entertainments, and welcomed the Indian 
chiefs who frequently came to see him. A parlor 
and a drawing-room were to the north of the hall, a 




Penn's Desk. 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 131 

library and a dining-room to the south. As was 
the custom then, the kitchen was a separate build- 
ing, but connected with the mansion by a covered 
passageway. Back of the kitchen was a building 
called "the brewhouse," where ale and ^'strong 
beer" were brewed. There was also a laundry and 
a stable for twelve horses, and at either end of the 
main house were small buildings, one of which was 
Penn's office for the transaction of the affairs of 
his province, the other for the business of his 
private estate. This was the way in which the 
large landowners of colonial times planned their 
homes and business offices. 

When Penn visited Philadelphia, he usually went 
down the Delaware in his private barge, rowed by 
six oarsmen. He seems to have enjoyed this mode 
of travel, and to have taken great pleasure in the 
scenery along the broad river. Gardens stretched 
from his house to the water front, and he trans- 
planted many native wild flowers to his own 
grounds, besides setting out walnuts, hawthorns, 
hazels, and fruit trees that he brought from Eng- 
land. 

He lived in fine style ; for William Penn, in spite 
of his urging simplicity in all things, could always 
appreciate and enjoy luxury. -1, He had very hand- 
some oak and walnut chairs and tables, satin 



132 WILLIAM PENN 

curtains, a wine cellar well stocked, and six large 
cisterns for holding water or beer. Frequently he 
played the part of host to many Indians, and it is 
said that he once entertained them at a long table 
spread out-of-doors, serving a hundred turkeys and 
a large quantity of venison. 

While the provincial Assembly was in session in 
Philadelphia Penn was very busy directing its 
business, but when it adjourned, he usually turned 
his attention to questions concerning the Indians, 
whom he regarded as almost as much his own 
people as the white settlers. When he made his 
first treaty with them, he planned to call them 
together twice each year to renew their treaty of 
friendship, to adjust any matters of trade that 
might have arisen, and to smoke the pipe of peace 
with them. His absence in England had for a 
long time made these meetings impossible, but he 
now resumed them, and called the chiefs into 
conference with him. 

The Delaware and Susquehanna tribes, who 
had now enjoyed his fair treatment for almost 
twenty years, were anxious to have Penn make 
agreements with other tribes, more especially those 
who lived in the country along the Potomac River. 
So they went to Onas, as Penn was usually called, 
and he agreed to meet their allies in April, 1701. 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 133 

At this meeting there came to see him many lead- 
ing Indians, — three kings, and the brother of the 
Emperor of the Five Nations, as well as forty other 
chiefs. With all these Penn made treaties of peace 
and trade, by which the Indians were to be pro- 
tected from the greed and cunning of white traders, 
and were, on their part, to sell their furs and skins 
only to Pennsylvanians. In this way he contrived 
to keep the red men friendly to the whites in his 
province, and gained the great benefit of having a 
bulwark of friendly Indians to protect his colony 
from enemies. When he made one of these treaties, 
he sent word of it to the government in England, 
and so increased his already well-deserved reputa- 
tion of knowing how to deal with the Indians better 
than any other governor of an English colony. 

At Pennsbury the family lived much like a family 
of high rank in England. The ladies dressed in silk 
and wore elaborate caps and buckles and golden 
ornaments. Penn himself bought no less than four 
wigs in one year at a cost of nearly twenty pounds. 
But if he was indulgent to his family and himself, 
he was always looking after the poor and the sick. 
When he heard of men or women in prison for debt, 
he contrived to get them out and start them 
afresh ; he was always ready to listen to and help 
those who came to him in any distress, and he gave 



134 WILLIAM PENN 

pensions of three shillings a week to many old 
people who were no longer able to support them- 
selves. His private cash books show a long list of 
generous giving that far outstrips the sums he 
spent for his own household use. 

Besides his barge on the river he had a coach, a 
calash, and a sedan chair. He was very fond of 
good horses, and had a number in his stables. 
Often, however, he found it easier to explore the 
neighboring country on foot than on horseback, 
and he was very fond of taking long walks through 
the woods. Once he was lost on a hill near Valley 
Forge, and wandered about for some time when he 
came to another height from which he saw the 
Schuylkill River. The first hill he named Mount 
Misery, and the second Mount Joy, and these 
names stuck to the hills for some time. 

A pleasant little incident is told of how, as Wil- 
liam Penn was riding one day to the Quaker meet- 
inghouse at Haverford, outside Philadelphia, he 
overtook a little barefooted girl, Rebecca Wood, 
who was also going to the meeting. He took her 
up behind him on the horse, and the two rode on to 
the meetinghouse, the little girl's bare legs making 
an odd constrast to the tall governor in his long 
coat and knee breeches. 

William and Hannah Penn entertained continu.- 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 135 

ally at their country home, preferring Pennsbury 
to the town. Penn's daughter Letitia, however, 
who was twenty years old,_and a very lively, 
handsome girl, did not care so much for the quiet 
of the country, and spent most of her time in 
Philadelphia with the Markhams, the Logans, or 
the Shippens. 

Penn always dealt fairly with the Indians, and 
they trusted him far more than they did most of 
the white men. He traveled through New Jersey, 
New York, and Maryland, being eager to see the 
country and also to spread Quaker influence as 
widely as he could in the new world. The life of a 
country gentleman suited him to perfection, and 
he was undoubtedly much happier in Pennsyl- 
vania than he had been when a courtier at White- 
hall in London, or striving to make other people 
believe that King James was as worthy a king as 
he himself thought him. 

Still, the government of Pennsylvania did not 
run smoothly even while Penn was there. Quakers 
and Church of England people were constantly 
wrangling, and the Assembly would not pass the 
laws that Penn thought it ought to. He was not 
making money from his province; he still had to 
pay large salaries, and he was constantly being 
asked for money for various purposes. Once he 



136 WILLIAM PENN 

declared that the province had meant a loss to him 
of £20,000. Occasionally he received payment 
from the sale of land or for rent, but the settlers 
were hard people to deal with and paid out their 
money grudgingly. 

The limits of Pennsylvania were still very in- 
definite, and for the most part were not settled 
until years later. The province was said to be 
bounded on the north by the southern limits of 
New York, and on the south by the northern Hmits 
of Maryland. Neither of these boundaries was 
actually settled until 1768. Westward the boun- 
dary was yet more vague, being defined by the 
words ^'as far to the westward as Maryland ex- 
tends. '^ But boundaries were not of great impor- 
tance then, when there was so much vacant land, 
although by 1702 great numbers of Germans, Swiss, 
Huguenots, and Scotch-Irish were coming into the 
province and taking up homesteads west and north 
of the little Quaker settlement on the Delaware. 

The Pennsylvania Assembly refused to grant 
certain supplies that were asked by King William 
in 1 701, and at the same time a bill was presented 
in the English Parliament to change the govern- 
ment of the English colonies in America. By this 
bill West and East Jersey were to be annexed to 
New York, and Penn's charter was to be revoked, 



PENN GOES TO AMERICA AGAIN 137 

he^being paid a certain sum in return, and his 
province turned into a Crown colony similar to 
New York. When Penn heard of this, he thought 
that he ought to return to England and fight it. This 
he expected would take him only a short time, and 
he planned to return to Pennsbury at the end of a 
year. He wanted to make his home there, and 
expected his wife and Letitia to stay there until he 
returned. But his family thought otherwise about 
being left behind. Penn wrote to James Logan : 
'^I can not prevail on my wife to stay: still less 
Tishe. I know not what to do." And in another 
letter he wrote: ^'The going of my wife and Tishe 
will add greatly to the expense ; more of living in 
London than of the passage. But they will not be 
denied." 

Both Mrs. Penn and Letitia were probably 
homesick for their native England. Letitia in 
particular missed her gay friends at home, and 
found the Quakers of the province a poor substi- 
tute. It happened that later, when she did re- 
turn to England, she gave up the Quaker faith and 
became a member of the Church of England. 
Mrs. Penn, in addition to other reasons for return- 
ing home, had already seen that her husband re- 
quired the help of her firm will and clear insight 
when he was beset with poHtical troubles in Eng- 



138 WILLIAM PENN 

land, and believed she could be of great assistance 
to him. So when Penn did return, he took his 
family with him. 

He made Andrew Hamilton deputy governor of 
the province, and James Logan secretary ; and on 
November 4, 1701, sailed from Philadelphia in 
the ship Dalmahoy. The ship made a very quick 
run, in fact one of the fastest voyages recorded at 
that time, taking only thirty-six days to cross; 
and by the middle of December Penn was again in 
London. He took apartments in Kensington, 
that he might be close to the king and Parliament 
in looking after his title to his province. 

It turned out that Penn never went back to 
Pennsylvania again, although some of his chil- 
dren did. Politics were to take all his attention ; 
he was to have no more of the country life in 
America that he had grown so fond of, and that 
seemed to bring out all the best qualities in his 
many-sided nature. 



CHAPTER XIII 
At Court and in Prison 

William Penn still had many friends at court, 
and it was doubtless largely through their efforts 
that he succeeded in having the bill to take Penn- 
sylvania away from him withdrawn from Parlia- 
ment. There were a number of prominent men 
in the government, however, who thought that 
none of the American colonies should be owned by 
private persons, but that all should be directly 
under the Crown, and these men soon offered 
another bill much like the earlier one. To defeat 
this, Penn and Lord Baltimore joined hands and 
ceased to wrangle over the boundary between 
Pennsylvania and Maryland. A few days after 
this bill was presented in Parliament, however, 
King William died from injuries resulting from the 
fall of a horse he was riding. The king had been 
influential in urging the change in the government 
of Penn's province, but his successor. Queen Anne, 
was much more friendly to Penn. The matter was 
therefore allowed to drop. 

139 



I40 WILLIAM PENN 

Although the daughter of James Stuart, Queen 
Anne was a Protestant, and had married a Protes- 
tant, Prince George of Denmark. She was Hberal 
to all religions, and soon after she became queen 
the Quakers asked Penn to present her with an 
address thanking her for the toleration toward all 
sects that she had promised to observe. Penn 
read the address. Queen Anne then answered 
graciously enough, ''Mr. Penn, I am so well pleased 
that what I have said is to your satisfaction, that 
you and your friends may be assured of my pro- 
tection, and I sincerely hope for your welfare and 
happiness." 

She kept her word to the Quakers, and also 
proved the constant friend of Penn. She had seen 
him much at court when her father was king, and 
knew of the old friendship between her father and 
the Quaker leader. Therefore Penn became in a 
way a courtier again, and held somewhat the same 
prominent position he had held before William 
came to the throne. 

He spent much of his time in London, where he 
now had friends in both the Whig and Tory parties. 
The leading statesmen thought so highly of his 
abihties that they frequently asked him to arrange 
political and personal matters that required tact 
and diplomatic skill. Sometimes he tried to exer- 



AT COURT AND IN PRISON 141 

cise these qualities by correspondence with the law- 
makers of Pennsylvania, and one of his latest efforts 
was on behalf of the negro slaves in the province. 
Ten years before he had tried to get justice done 
to these people, but in vain. Now he felt more 
strongly than ever that it was wrong to import 
negroes into the new country as slaves. He worked 
for this object until he induced the colonial Assem- 
bly to try to discourage that traffic by placing a 
duty on the importing of slaves. In 1711 they 
prohibited such importation in the future, but no 
sooner had word of this good law reached England 
than the government there, in spite of Penn's 
efforts, canceled the Pennsylvania act. Yet the 
wisest statesmen in England realized that Penn 
was right, and that the course he was urging his 
colony to adopt, not only in regard to negro slavery 
but in all matters that dealt with human Hberty and 
enHghtenment, was the best for the new world to 
follow. 

Of Penn's children by his first wife, the lively 
Letitia married William Aubrey, who was harsh 
and overbearing to her father and tyrannical tow- 
ard her. His son William had married, but had 
become very dissipated during his father's visit to 
Pennsylvania, and was now the black sheep of the 
family. He owed a great many debts and was in 



142 WILLIAM PENN 

danger of being put into prison for them, so Penn 
decided he would be better off in Pennsylvania, 
and sent him out to Pennsbury. He was to be en- 
couraged to Hve a healthy outdoor life, and have 
horses and hounds for hunting foxes, deer, and 
wolves. The son went out to Pennsbury, and 
James Logan tried to keep a watchful and restrain- 
ing eye on him, but he managed to get into almost 
as much trouble there as he had in London, in spite 
of all efforts to keep him straight. 

A great change had come over England since the 
days when the Stuarts were sovereigns. The old 
brutal laws had been abolished for the most part, 
and there was far less cruelty and violence. In- 
stead of the dissolute Charles and the treacherous 
James, the rulers were honorable and virtuous. 
There were no longer constant rumors of plots and 
conspiracies, and all religions were treated fairly. 
William Penn found that he was no longer needed 
to help some poor Quaker who had fallen under the 
disfavor of officers of the law. Now his difficulties 
were mainly those connected with trying to provide 
a decent government for his province, and to get 
enough money from it to pay expenses. 

Before Penn left Pennsylvania the Assembly 
there had voted to pay him £2000, but that was 
soon spent, and the settlers were so economical that 



AT COURT AND IN PRISON 143 

they did not wish to give him anything more. 
Again and again he wrote to James Logan about 
his financial difficulties in managing Pennsylvania. 
In one letter he said: ''Never had poor man my 
task, with neither men nor money to assist me. I 
therefore strictly charge thee that thou represent 
to Friends there, that I am forced to borrow money, 
and add debts to debts, instead of paying them off. 
. . . Make return with all speed or I'm undone." 
He tried many ways to make his province pay 
him something in return for the work and money he 
had already bestowed on it. He urged Logan to buy 
and send him as many furs as he could get, knowing 
that they would bring a good price in England. 
At one time he thought of selHng his government 
directly to the English Crown for a sum sufficient 
to pay off all his debts. There was considerable 
haggHng about the price and the sale was never 
made. Meantime his son William was getting 
into more trouble at Pennsbury and in Philadel- 
phia. One night he and a dissipated comrade 
began to beat the night watch. He received a 
thrashing, and was afterwards treated as a common 
rioter. The son had been given a manor in the 
hope that he would look after it, but instead he 
sold it and squandered all the money. At last 
Penn sent for him to come home, and when William 



144 WILLIAM PENN 

the younger finally reached England, he took to 
his former way of living, and incurred fresh debts 
for his already impoverished and indulgent parent. 

Penn figured that he had lost £30,000 by his 
province. ''O Pennsylvania/' he wrote, *'what 
hast thou cost me ! Above £30,000 more than I 
ever got by it, two hazardous and most fatiguing 
voyages, my straits and slavery here, and my child's 
soul almost. ... In short, I must sell all or be 
undone, and disgraced into the bargain." 

The man who was now acting as deputy governor 
of Pennsylvania was proving a poor makeshift, 
and conditions in the province seemed to be going 
from bad to worse. Opposition to Penn himself 
also was increasing, and presently the Assembly 
passed a set of resolutions that were sent to him in 
London. These resolutions made many complaints 
against his government of the province, charging 
him with having sided with enemies of the colony, 
with having extorted money from settlers in the 
sale of lands, with having failed to pay a former 
governor's salary, and ended by stating that some- 
thing must be done to suppress lawlessness in the 
province. When it became known that the As- 
sembly had sent such a note to Penn, the colonists 
at once objected to the offensiveness of its tone. 
Orders were given to recall the resolutions, and, in 



AT COURT AND IN PRISON 145 

an attempt to straighten the matter out, the 
Assembly voted £1200 for the support of Penn's 
government. All might now have gone smoothly 
had not the deputy governor, John Evans, tried to 
scare the Quakers by a foolish trick. He had been 
wanting to build up a militia for the province, but 
the Quakers had objected to this. So, on the day 
of the annual fair, Evans arranged to have a mes- 
senger ride into Philadelphia, bringing the exciting 
news that a force of French soldiers had been seen 
on the Delaware heading toward Philadelphia. 
Then Evans buckled on his sword and rode up and 
down before the people, urging them to arm and 
defend their province. 

There was a brief alarm, during which the larger 
ships on the Delaware were hurried up the river 
while the smaller craft were concealed in creeks. 
Silverware and valuables were hidden, but only 
four men came to the meeting-place Evans had 
appointed to enroll as militiamen. When it was 
discovered how Evans had tried to trick them, the 
settlers were highly indignant, and sent a com- 
plaint to Penn in England. Penn also heard that 
there was much criticism of his friend and secretary, 
James Logan. 

A few of the men in whom Penn trusted, like 
James Logan, were entirely worthy of his trust, 



146 WILLIAM PENN 

but there were many who were not. Among these 
latter was a man named Philip Ford, a Quaker, 
who had for some time been acting as steward of 
Penn's estates in England and Ireland. Penn 
grew very fond of Ford, as he had been very fond 
of James Stuart, and at length made him a present 
of ten thousand acres in Pennsylvania, a city lot 
in Philadelphia, and one hundred and fifty acres 
in the suburbs. 

Ford sent accounts to Penn from time to time, 
but Penn was not a good business man, and did 
not bother to look into the accounts. Finally, 
when he did, he found the surprising fact that al- 
though Ford had received from Penn £17,000 and 
had only spent £16,000, nevertheless Penn owed 
him £10,500. Ford brought about this result by 
charging very large commissions, adding compound 
interest every six months to all money advanced, 
and claiming an exceedingly large salary, to say 
nothing of sometimes failing to credit Penn with 
money actually received from him. 

Yet Penn, although surprised at this new debt, 
made no investigation into the crooked accounts, 
and at length, when Ford kept urging him to pay 
the debt, Penn was so foolish as to give Ford a 
deed of the province of Pennsylvania as security 
for this claim that he did not really owe. To make 



AT COURT AND IN PRISON 147 

matters worse, a little later Penn accepted from 
Ford a lease of the province, so that it appeared 
that he had actually transferred the province to 
this corrupt steward and was now leasing it from 
him. 

None of this strange transaction was made public 
until Ford died, but then his widow and son declared 
how the matter stood and announced that they 
were the legal owners of Pennsylvania. Penn, 
they said, was merely their tenant, and they sued 
him for rent amounting to £3000. They got 
judgment against him, and then, when he failed to 
pay it, had him arrested and put in prison for the 
debt. So now we find the owner of the great prov- 
ince of Pennsylvania not only shorn of his title 
to his property, but actually in jail on a charge of 
failing to pay his rent. 

When the officers came to arrest him, they found 
him at the Quaker meeting in Gracechurch Street 
in London, strange to say the very place where he 
had first been arrested thirty-seven years before 
for preaching to the Quakers. 

For nine months Penn had to stay in prison, 
while the suit against him dragged slowly through 
the courts of chancery. The fact that he had paid 
so little attention to Ford's accounts, and had made 
no complaint about the figures in them, made it 



148 WILLIAM PENN 

look as if the claim against him might be just. His 
friends tried to straighten out the tangled matter, 
and meantime Penn, who was allowed fairly com- 
fortable quarters, held small reHgious meetings, and 
kept himself as serene and untroubled as in the 
heyday of his fortunes. In this again the strong 
character of WilHam Penn appears, for he was not 
cast down by misfortune. His friend Isaac Norris 
bore witness to this quahty. ^' After all," said 
Norris, ''I think the fable of the palm good in him 
— ^the more he is pressed, the more he rises.' He 
seems a spirit fit to bear and rub through difficulties, 
and as thou observes his foundation remains. I 
have been at some meetings with him, and have 
been much comforted in them, and particularly 
last First-day." 

Gradually pubHc sympathy, especially among the 
Quakers, began to be aroused by the fact of Penn's 
imprisonment. He had done so much for the 
Quaker cause, and had tried so hard to give his 
province a good government, that people were 
indignant that he should now be so set upon by 
such people as the Fords. So friends raised the 
sum of £7600, and gave this to the Fords in settle- 
ment of their claim, and in return Penn gave his 
friends a mortgage on Pennsylvania to secure the 
repayment of the money they had lent him. 



AT COURT AND IN PRISON 149 

Meantime, while he was still in prison, his deputy 
governor Evans had been behaving so badly that 
the people of the province decided they would stand 
him no longer. Penn, having once felt a strong 
friendship !or this man, would have put up with 
almost any injustice from him. Three prominent 
Quakers went to him in the Fleet Prison, however, 
and told him that unless he removed Evans from the 
governorship the people would appeal to Queen 
Anne to settle the matter. This might result in 
taking the province from him; so, reluctantly, 
Penn agreed to dismiss Evans from his position. 
Even then, however, he was so fond of Evans that 
he would not let him know that he disapproved of 
his acts. He wrote to James Logan, asking him 
to explain the matter to his deputy governor, and 
said, ''Pray break it to him and that the reason why 
I chose to change, rather than contest with the 
complaints before the queen in council, is, that he 
may stand the fairer for any employment else- 
where; which would be very doubtful if those 
blemishes were aggravated in such a presence.'* 

In place of Evans, Penn sent out as the new gov- 
ernor another friend of his. Colonel Charles Gookin. 
He wrote very flattering accounts of this new 
governor to the people of Philadelphia. 

Stanchness in standing by his friends, even when 



I50 WILLIAM PENN 

it was shown that those friends were utterly untrust- 
worthy, had proved nearly as disastrous to William 
Penn in the government of his province as it had 
proved to his fortunes in England in the days when 
he had supported James Stuart against King Wil- 
ham. It may have been a fine fault, but a fault it 
was, nevertheless. 



CHAPTER XIV 

Penn's Work Completed 

When Penn left the Fleet Prison, he went to his 
home at Brentford, nine miles out of London, and 
stayed there for a short time, after which he moved 
with his family to a country place in the Berkshire 
Hills called Ruscombe. While he was here he kept 
up his efforts to sell Pennsylvania to the EngHsh 
Crown, and, as that matter dragged along with Httle 
result, he tried his best to straighten out the tangled 
government of his colony by sending long letters 
to James Logan and other officers in Philadelphia. 
In its early days the province had been a great 
pleasure to him, but now it seemed to be only a 
source of continual misunderstandings and debts. 
He felt that, however much the colony might have 
profited others, it had proved almost a thankless 
burden to himself. He wrote to some of the colo- 
nists just what his feeHngs were in regard to Penn- 
sylvania. ^' The many combats I have engaged in," 
he said, "the great pains and incredible expense to 
your welfare and ease, to the decay of my former 



152 WILLIAM PENN 

estate, of which (however some there would rep- 
resent it) I too sensibly feel the effects, with the 
undeserved opposition I have met with from 
thence, sink me into sorrow, that if not supported by 
a superior hand, might have overwhelmed me long 
ago. And I cannot but think it hard measure, 
that, while that has proved a land of freedom and 
flourishing, it should become to me, by whose 
means it was principally made a country, the cause 
of grief, trouble, and poverty." 

Although the English Crown was anxious to take 
over the province of Pennsylvania, there were many 
obstacles to their coming to an agreement with 
Penn. Some of these obstacles he at length com- 
promised ; for example, he agreed that he and his 
family should have only 8oo,oop acres in fee, in 
place of all the rights to real estate that had been 
granted him under the original charter. He 
insisted that there should be no official estabHsh- 
ing of the Church of England in Pennsylvania, that 
no pubHc money should be used for one sect in pref- 
erence to others, and that public offices should be 
open to all settlers. After much controversy the 
English government drew up a new charter or 
constitution, modeled after those in New York 
and New Jersey, except that nothing whatever was 
said in the charter about establishing the Church 



PENN'S WORK COMPLETED 153 

of England ; while the question of the right to vote 
on public matters was left for the people themselves 
to decide. 

By 1 7 10 the arrangements to take over Pennsyl- 
vania from Penn were about completed. He then 
wrote a long letter to the people of his province, 
addressing them as "My Old Friends," and setting 
forth what he had tried to do for them, and how 
of late they had pained him by their continual 
squabbles. His writing showed his surprise that 
Pennsylvania had not been the home of peace he 
expected it would be. In one part of the letter he 
said, ''Friends! the eyes of many are upon you; 
the people of many nations of Europe look on that 
country as a land of ease and quiet, wishing to 
themselves in vain the same blessings they con- 
ceive you may enjoy ; but to see the use you make 
of them is no less the cause of surprise to others, 
while such bitter complaints and reflections are 
seen to come from you, of which it is difficult to con- 
ceive either the sense or meaning. What are the 
distresses, grievances, and oppressions, that the 
papers, sent from thence, so often say you lan- 
guish under, while others have cause to believe 
you have hitherto lived, or might live, the happiest 
of any in the Queen^s dominions ? " He graciously 
closed his letter in these words : '' God give you 



154 WILLIAM PENN 

his wisdom and fear to direct you, that yet our 
poor country may be blessed with peace, love, and 
industry, and we may once more meet good friends, 
and live so to the end, our relation in the Truth 
having but the same true interest. I am, with 
great truth and most sincere regard, your real 
friend, as well as just Proprietor and Governor, 
William Penn." 

The English Crown was to payPenn £12,000 in 
four annual installments. Before the matter could 
be finally settled it had to be ratified by an Act of 
Parliament ; however, there seemed little reason to 
doubt but that the affair was practically settled, 
and so Penn considered it. Although he was 
now almost seventy years old, he made many 
journeys through England in order to spread the 
Quaker doctrines. In his leisure moments he 
added many maxims to the collection he had made, 
and did other writing as well. He seems to have 
given up the idea of returning to his house at 
Pennsbury, although he sometimes spoke as if he 
should Hke to return, if only his affairs in London 
would let him do so. 

Some time before he had been taken ill, having 
what appeared to be a stroke of paralysis. He 
recovered from this, but a second recurrence of 
his illness came, and then a third. This last made 



PENN'S WORK COMPLETED 155 

him a complete invalid, and even affected his mind 
to a certain degree. Although calm and serene, he 
could not transact business intelligently. This 
prevented the completion of the sale of his title to 
Pennsylvania; for, his mind being impaired, he 
could not give a valid deed to the government. As 
a result the title to the province stayed in his family 
until the American Revolution in 1776. 

When he could not attend to matters in Pennsyl- 
vania, his wife took charge, and she managed them 
very capably. It was she who discharged a deputy 
governor who was quarreling with the Assembly 
there, and appointed in his place an excellent gov- 
ernor. Sir William Keith, who proved a popular and 
very successful officer. Also, trade in Pennsylvania 
was now beginning to boom, so that in a short time 
the province became much more valuable, and it 
turned out well for Penn's wife and children that 
he had not sold his title to the English Crown. 

Penn remained an invalid until his death on 
July 30, 1 7 18, and during this time, freed from care 
concerning his province, he delighted in the quiet 
country life at Ruscombe, and in the company of 
his devoted wife and younger children. Many 
friends came to visit him, and on Sundays he was 
driven to the meetinghouse, where he would some- 
times speak briefly, always proclaiming his faith in 



156 WILLIAM PENN 

the religion that had been the guide and mainstay 
of his eventful life. 

William Penn was always a deeply religious and 
honorable man, thoroughly sincere, and indomi- 
table in his defense of what he believed to be the 
truth. He was a great man, for he led the new 
sect of Quakers through their early trials ; he had 
the vision to build them a new home beyond the 
seas and to set them standards of liberty and 
government that were far in advance of his time. 
His faults of judgment were many; he too often 
trusted the wrong men, and frequently he showed 
himself a child in caring for money matters. These 
faults, however, were never faults of character, 
but rather of a nature too generous and confiding. 
We usually think of him as a quiet, simple Quaker, 
wearing plain clothes and caring little or nothing 
for luxury or display. In reality he was quite 
different. He was a man of action, a man who was 
naturally fond of court Hfe, who liked power, who 
was restless and eager, and who would have made 
a better soldier than a statesman. While he lived 
in Pennsylvania he Hved up to his idea of a great 
landed proprietor and governor, and he Hked to 
be regarded as the leading man among the Quakers 
both in Pennsylvania and in England. 

His province of Pennsylvania was at once the 




^^3^:^^^%^ 



PENN'S WORK COMPLETED 157 

delight and the torment of his existence. He liked 
his ideal of what such a colony ought to be, but he 
found the actual management of it one long series 
of quarrels and money difficulties. He dealt fairly 
with settlers and Indians, probably more fairly 
than any other governor of an American colony, 
and the Indians seemed to appreciate his fair deal- 
ing more than did the white men. The colony 
owed something to his guidance, but a great deal 
more to the noble spirit of Kberty of reHgion in 
which he founded it. There is to be found what has 
made the name of WilHam Penn illustrious and be- 
loved, for he had a great vision of human Hberty 
and he worked mightily to make that vision become 
a reality. In the Hght of his splendid ambitions his 
mistakes count for Httle. He tried to do great good, 
which is the best that can be said of any man. 



CHAPTER XV 

Pennsylvania under Penn's Descendants 

William Penn's son by his first wife, named for 
himself, the one who had been sent to Pennsylvania 
in the hope that he would give over his wild way 
of living, inherited the property in England and 
Ireland, most of which had belonged to his mother. 
Letitia, who had married William Aubrey, had al- 
ready received a dower, and later received ten 
thousand acres of land in Pennsylvania, as did 
each of the younger William's children, Gulielma, 
Maria, Springett, and William. The remainder of 
Penn's estate went to his second wife, Hannah 
Penn, and her five children, John, Thomas, Mar- 
garet, Richard, and Dennis. Hannah Penn had 
practically all the powers over the province that 
her husband had wielded, and she used them 
capably, proving a most excellent business woman. 
She arranged that her eldest son, John, should be- 
come the principal Proprietary of the province, as 
he was called, and his brothers Thomas and Richard 
his associates. The youngest son, Dennis, died very 
young. 

1S8 



UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS 159 

From 1712 to 1727 Hannah Penn managed the 
affairs of Pennsylvania, and far more successfully 
than her husband had done. He had left his prov- 
ince in such a debt-ridden condition that it had 
seemed as if it would have to be sold to the Crown 
to straighten it out, but Hannah Penn left it to her 
three sons in such excellent shape that it was gen- 
erally considered to be one of the finest domains 
in the world owned by private individuals. 

Sir William Keith, the governor who had been 
appointed by Hannah Penn, managed affairs with 
success for some time, but finally came disagree- 
ments with Mrs. Penn. He beheved that her son 
John would not make a good manager of the prov- 
ince, and secretly advised the popular leaders in 
the colony to try to abolish the Proprietary system 
of government. This caused Hannah Penn to 
appoint Patrick Gordon to succeed Governor 
Keith in 1726. 

In 1732 Thomas Penn made a visit to Pennsyl- 
vania, and he was followed by his older brother 
John in 1734. Neither of these sons of William 
Penn made a good impression in Philadelphia, 
and it is said that the people there even preferred 
young William Penn, with all his bad manners 
and wildness, to these two half-brothers of his. 
Neither John nor Thomas seem to have had the 



i6o WILLIAM PENN 

broadmindedness and kindly disposition of their 
father, but to have been unscrupulous, overbearing, 
and too eager to make all the money they could 
out of the colony. John was somewhat better liked 
than Thomas, who seemed to have Kttle sense about 
anything but money-getting. Benjamin Franklin, 
who was editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette during 
the visit of the two sons of Penn to Philadelphia, 
but who had never met the roystering young 
William, is reported to have said to a friend that 
"according to all accounts there was more of the 
gentleman in Billy Penn drunk than in both of these 
Penns sober." 

John Penn returned to England in 1736, and 
Thomas in 1741, and neither ever returned to 
Pennsylvania, having about as much affection for 
their father's province as the province had for 
them. 

Governor Gordon, who had been appointed by 
Hannah Penn, had a successful administration and 
held the office until his death in 1736. The Penn 
brothers then chose George Thomas to the place, 
and he proved a most loyal adherent of England 
until he resigned in 1747. James Hamilton, the 
first governor of Pennsylvania who was born and 
bred in America, succeeded him, and proved the 
most popular governor since WilHam Penn had 



UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS i6i 

made his second visit to his province. Governor 
Hamilton felt that Pennsylvania would be better 
off as an English colony than under the proprietor- 
ship of the Pent! family, and most of the people 
agreed with him, but no definite steps in that direc- 
tion were taken. John Penn had died, and the 
two brothers who survived him, Thomas and 
Richard, knew that Hamilton was too popular 
with the Pennsylvanians to be removed from office. 
After a while, however, disagreements developed 
to such a degree that Hamilton resigned, and the 
governors who followed had to face new difficulties 
arising from the fact that the French were in- 
fluencing the Indians against the English colonists, 
in Pennsylvania no less than in New England and 
New York. William Penn's policy of fair dealing 
with the Indians had been abandoned by his sons, 
and the frontiersmen were made to feel the 
result in constant attacks on their outlying settle- 
ments. 

The Quakers did not believe in warfare, but the 
men on the Pennsylvania frontiers, Scotch-Irish, 
Swiss, and Germans, had to arm and form com- 
panies for self-protection after General Braddock's 
defeat by the French and Indians. They felt that 
they ought to have some help, financial if no other, 
from the wealthy people in the eastern part of the 



i62 WILLIAM PENN 

province ; and at length they succeeded in getting 
the Assembly to vote for supplies. When it came 
to raising this money, the property of the Penns had 
to be taxed, and this gave the greatest offense to 
Thomas and Richard Penn in England. They 
removed the governor, and tried to fight the tax, 
but the colonists replied by voting the tax again 
and even increasing the amount the Penns had to 
pay. The governor who had been removed told 
FrankKn that he was glad to be rid of the job, 
adding that three years of the governorship as he 
had held it would turn any man against the Pro- 
prietary system. To which Franklin answered, 
''Particularly with Tom and Dick Penn for Pro- 
prietors !" 

In 1763 John Penn, the son of Richard, and 
grandson of William Penn, became governor, and 
his term of office was the stormiest and least 
creditable of all the governorships that the prov- 
ince had known. During his first year in office a 
revolt took place in the mountains which became 
known as the ''revolution of the Paxton boys." 
A crowd of mountaineers defied a battalion of 
British regulars in the town of Lancaster, and an- 
nounced that if the regulars dared to fire " so much 
as one shot, their scalps would ornament every 
cabin from the Susquehanna to the Ohio." 




From " The Family of William Penn," by Howard M. Jenkins. 
Four of William Penn's Grandchildren. 
Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

The picture shows the children of Thomas Penn — Juliana, Louisa Hannah, 
John, and Granville. 



UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS 163 

The soldiers did not fire, and the Paxton boys 
thereupon helped themselves to all the horses they 
wanted, took the ammunition wagons belonging to 
the regulars, and set out for Philadelphia. There 
were almost a thousand of them when they arrived 
on the high ground of Germantown, and there 
demanded that certain Indians who were being 
kept under guard in the Northern Liberties ^ should 
be given to them on pain of their sacking the city 
otherwise. 

The citizens found that the regular troops could 
not be relied on, and sent some deputies to treat 
with the rebels. By agreeing to all the latter 
demanded, except the massacre of the Indians, 
the deputies were finally able to induce the moun- 
taineers to return to their homes. 

Very soon afterward the Assembly petitioned the 
English ParHament to abolish the Proprietary 

1 It is interesting to recall that this term, "Liberties," had been 
applied to certain tracts of land lying north and west of the 
original Umits of Philadelphia. The soil contained in these tracts 
was called "liberty land" or "free lots" because William Penn had 
made a gift of land in these sections to the first purchasers of lots 
in the city proper, the amount of "free" land given being in pro- 
portion to the amount of "town" land that was bought. The 
term, "City and Liberties of Philadelphia," was commonly used 
in the early days of the province, the city containing about 1820 
acres, and the Liberties about 16,236 acres. Later, the Northern 
Liberties became a part of the city of Philadelphia. 



1 64 WILLIAM PENN 

government. Before Parliament did this, however, 
another misadventure had occurred in the province. 
About 1762 fifty families from Connecticut had 
moved to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, 
and believing the country there to be very produc- 
tive, they had made some clearings, built log 
cabins, and grown some fields of corn. John Penn, 
the governor, heard of this, and in 1764 he sent con- 
stables to this settlement to order the pioneers off, 
claiming that they were on land that had been 
granted to his grandfather. 

The Wyoming settlement now numbered about 
three thousand persons, and naturally they were 
unwilHng to give up their lands. Then a company 
was formed in Philadelphia to buy that section of 
the country from John Penn, and, making use of 
the improvements of the Connecticut settlers, 
market it as the company saw fit. They would 
only buy it, however, on condition that John Penn 
should first drive out the settlers. 

So John Penn, in 1770, hired a crowd of rascals 
to go into the Wyoming Valley and drive the 
pioneers away from their cabins and fields. The 
settlers answered Penn's demands by building a 
fort which they christened Forty Fort, in honor of 
the first settlers, who were forty in number. They 
were always referred to as the First Forty, and were 



UNDER PENN'S DESCENDANTS 165 

held in high esteem. They had been sent by the 
Susquehanna Company of Connecticut into the 
Wyoming Valley. 

After some fighting the settlers managed to hold 
their ground. This became known as the Penna- 
mite War ; and, although the governor was backed 
by some of the leading men of Philadelphia, his 
attempts to oust the settlers made his rule more 
distasteful than ever to a people who were growing 
more and more fond of liberty. 

The American Revolution was now at hand, and 
the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety decided 
that it was time to annul the charter that had 
been granted to William Penn, and abolish the 
Proprietary government. Therefore, two months 
after the Declaration of Independence was signed, 
in 1776, the Committee of Safety, now calling it- 
self the ''Supreme Executive Council," deposed 
John Penn from his office, and decreed that what 
had been the province of Pennsylvania should be- 
come a state in the new American Union. 

The boundaries of Pennsylvania were by that 
time definitely settled, and incidentally those 
boundaries included the rich Wyoming Valley, 
where now stands the prosperous city of Wilkes- 
Barre. The title that had belonged to the Penn 
family was now vested in the state, and the state 



1 66 WILLIAM PENN 

appropriated £130,000 to be paid to the heirs of 
William Penn. In addition to this amount the 
heirs of William Penn, having sided with the Tories 
during the Revolution, claimed ^^ large sum from 
the English government after the Revolution, 
basing their claim on the Act of Parliament that 
agreed " to indemnify loyal subjects of his Britannic 
Majesty for losses suffered in the American War." 
The English government settled this claim by 
paying William Penn's heirs £500,000. As a 
result these heirs secured from Pennsylvania and 
from England more than three million dollars, 
besides retaining the private estates in Pennsyl- 
vania that they had always owned. 

Eventually, therefore, Penn's province proved 
of very great value to his children and grandchil- 
dren, although the people who had opened up and 
settled that new country had gained little from 
those descendants; they had to look back to the 
great founder, William Penn, the noble and stead- 
fast Quaker, for the liberty-loving ideas and wise 
principles of government that helped to make 
Pennsylvania one of the greatest of the new union 
of states. It is well that his name should forever 
be associated with that state, for it is the name of 
a man of noble character and a fearless champion 
of liberty. 

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By MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT 

Southern Soldier Stories 

By GEORGE GARY EGGLESTON 



The addition of these eight titles to the Juvenile Library increases the 
usefulness and broadens the scope of that popular series of books for 
younger readers. Each of these stories will be found good reading, 
reading of the kind which specialists in the study of child literature can 
heartily recommend. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Everychild's Series 

Edited by Dr. JAMES H. VAN SICKLE 

Each volume, cloth, i2mo, illustraied, 4.0 cents 

The Everychild's Series is a library of fiction and dramatics, 
science and information, literature and art for children. Its 
contents include a wide range of subject matter, which will 
broaden the child's interest in plays and games, fairy-tales 
and fables, nature study and geography, useful arts and indus- 
tries, biography and history, government and public service, 
myths and folk-lore, fine arts and literature. 
This series seeks not only to instruct the child with simplicity, 
charm, and wholesomeness, but to heighten his finer apprecia- 
tion of the beautiful, and to give him, along with keen enjoy- 
ment, the things of life that are interesting and valuable. 
The authors of the books of this series have been chosen for 
their special fitness to write books for children. To each 
author has been given the choice of topic and method of 
treatment. The result is that the books in the series are not 
only charming and enjoyable but intellectually satisfying to 
the child. 

The volumes are interesting and attractive in appearance. 
They are neatly and strongly bound in cloth with design in 
two colors. The type page is set leaded in large type with a 
wide margin. The illustrations are numerous and attractive 
and designed especially to represent the characters that appear 
in the story. 

The series is a splendid source of supplementary reading ma- 
terial. It consists of over a score of volumes. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



UBRARY OF CONGRESS 





014 311 181 7« 



